"Kintsugi", a Japanese word for "golden joinery", is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery by mending the areas of breakage with lacquer dusted or mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum. The glue traditionally used to bring the pieces together is the "urushi lacquer", which is being sourced for thousands of years from the "Rhus verniciflua" plant.

The kintsugi technique may have been invented around the fifteenth century, when Ashikaga Yoshimasa, the eighth shogun of the Ashikaga shogunate after breaking his favourite tea cup sent it to China to get it repaired. When it was returned, it was repaired with ugly metal staples. It may have prompted Japanese craftsmen to look for a more refined means of repair, and completely new beautiful art objects were created out of ugly broken pieces. Collectors became so enamored of the new art that some were accused of deliberately smashing valuable pottery so it could be repaired with the gold seams of kintsugi.

On a philosophical level "kintsugi' is a metaphor for embracing our flaws and imperfections, appreciating the brokenness. According to the Japanese philosophy, all beautiful things carry distinctions of imperfection; our wounds and our imperfections are our beauty.

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