Imagine having a beautiful vase decorating your living room.

And it’s not just a

vase; it’s a genuine nineteenth-century, hand-painted piece of porcelain created in
the Satsuma province in Japan. One day, your neighbor’s dog sneaks into your
garden, walks into your living room, and pushes over the vase with a wild jump of
enthusiasm, breaking it into pieces. You’re devastated, as the vase was one of your
most valuable decorative objects. And now, it’s destroyed. But your neighbor, who
happens to be a Japanese elder, offers help.. Using gold lacquer, she carefully
mends the pieces of the vase. The result: the vase has been repaired, but the
cracks still show. The golden lines highlight the event of being broken and fixed;
it has become part of its beauty. The art of mending what’s broken using gold
lacquer is what the Japanese call ‘Kintsugi.’ But Kintsugi isn’t just a technique
or method to repair broken pottery; there’s a profound philosophy behind it. At the
heart of its practice, Kintsugi is concerned with things like the appreciation of
imperfection, the acceptance of transience, and the cherishing of things that have
been broken and scarred. Through these underlying philosophical ideas, Kintugi
becomes a metaphor for how we approach our lives and makes us wonder how our
attitudes toward life’s perceived flaws could change for the better. After all,
looking at this contemporary inclination toward self-enhancement and flawlessness,
aren’t we living in a society obsessed with perfection? Moreover, isn’t our general
response to what’s “broken” to throw it away instead of trying to fix it (let alone
appreciate its brokenness)? Aren’t we preoccupied with hiding our scars instead of
wearing them with dignity? But questioning our attitudes toward flaws, brokenness,
and imperfection becomes even more interesting if we apply it to our lives. Most of
us carry the weight of the past, including scars (sometimes visible) we’ve obtained
along the way. And even in the present day, the brokenness of our lives may be
apparent, and our ‘screwed-upness,’ so to speak, weaved into the fabric of our
being. The ravages of time leave an imprint: scars, cracks, and seams of continual
damage and repair. And, more than often, we try to hide these imperfections.
Kintsugi doesn’t hide the history of brokenness; it accentuates it, making it a
feature of beauty rather than something to put out of sight. This video explores
the Japanese concept of Kintsugi and how a screwed-up, broken life can be
beautiful, and I’ll give you a small tour of my hometown to illustrate the
philosophy behind this concept. Kintsugi means “golden joinery” in Japanese.
According to historians, the idea originated in the late 15th century as an
alternative to repairing pottery using metal staples. It’s commonly believed that
when the shogun Ashikaga Yoshimasa broke his favorite tea bowl, he was displeased
by the inelegant repairs (using metal staples) and thus ordered the artisans to
think of a better solution. And so they decided to use gold lacquer, an idea that
gave birth to the practice of Kintsugi. The shift from using metal staples to gold
lacquer was more than just a matter of aesthetics. The approach caused a revolution
regarding how we look at damage and repair. Instead of seeing something broken as
useless and valueless, Kintsugi allows us to view the fractures as another chapter
in the object’s life. The golden seams narrate its resilience and the object’s
history, namely, that it has been broken. We could say that through this event, the
object gained character: it endured hardship and now wears its scars proudly and
beautifully. Kintsugi also overlaps with other Japanese philosophical concepts,
which we’ll explore later in this video.