{
  "id": "kintsugi",
  "title": "Kintsugi",
  "type": "craft",
  "summary": "The Japanese craft of mending broken pottery with gold-dusted lacquer, treating the repair as visible history rather than a flaw to hide.",
  "body": "Kintsugi (金継ぎ, «golden joinery»), also called kintsukuroi, is the Japanese art of repairing broken ceramics with urushi lacquer mixed or dusted with powdered gold, silver or platinum. Rather than disguising the damage, it traces every crack in a bright metallic seam, so the mended object wears its history openly.\n\nThe craft is bound to a philosophy: wabi-sabi, which finds beauty in imperfection and impermanence, and mottainai, the regret of waste. A bowl that has been broken and rejoined is understood to be more beautiful, and more valuable, for having survived — its biography made visible in gold.\n\nIts origins are semi-legendary, often traced to the 15th-century shogun Ashikaga Yoshimasa, said to have been dissatisfied with the ugly metal staples used to mend a favourite tea bowl and to have prompted a more artful solution; the technique matured alongside the tea ceremony. That origin is traditional rather than firmly documented, but the practice itself is a living craft, passed hand to hand in workshops to this day.",
  "culture": "Japanese",
  "region": "Japan",
  "language": "ja",
  "transmission": "mixed",
  "tags": [
    "ceramics",
    "repair",
    "wabi-sabi",
    "philosophy",
    "craft"
  ],
  "sources": [],
  "confidence": "documented",
  "contributor": "seed",
  "added": "2026-07-12",
  "updated": "2026-07-12",
  "url": "https://crowdh.com/knowledge/kintsugi.html"
}