[gregoire]

I'm slightly doubtful that this is an authentic thing (by which I mean: "actually practiced in the 15th/16th centuries"). Most of the content around this technique on the web is not in Japanese, and even the Japanese Wikipedia entry about it [0] is quite terse.

Or maybe it's just that non-Japanese people have more interest in it than Japanese do?

If anyone has more knowledge about kintsugi, I would love some historical references which confirm that this technique was actually used in the past.

[0]: https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E9%87%91%E7%B6%99%E3%81%8E

[karagenit]

The Smithsonian has about a hundred objects listed with "gold lacquer repair", most items have a date and location listed which goes back to 16th century Japan [0]. To be fair, I suppose these repairs could have been done on old objects in more recent times, I'm not really sure if there are any writings or documents describing the process from that time period.

[0] https://asia.si.edu/search/Lacquer+Repair

[gregoire]

Impressive collection, thanks!

[forgotmyoldname]

Yeah, this is one of those things that everyone seems to know about, but when you ask Japanese people, most are like, “That’s a thing? Maybe I’ve seen it but probably not.”

There are… a lot of things like this, and I’m not sure why Japan is made out to be more mythical than most countries.

[Atomask]

Japanese not knowing about things Japanese seems to be common. Most younger Japanese don't seem to know the difference between a Buddhist temple (tera) and a Shinto shrine (jinja). I'm pretty sure the kintsugi stuff stems from Shinto ideas. Shinto can enshrine anything as sacred. Usually it is an object from nature, but it doesn't have to be; it can be something people have created (matsuru (verb) - to make a god; matsuri (noun) - a festival (celebrating a god). It can be an object that someone has loved or used for a long time. If used in a negative way, such objects can become "cursed," or perhaps "angry" that they have been abused. This seems to be projection, of course. This isn't voodoo; Japanese are probably aware of this. The enshrining in this case has been degraded to "care for," at least in terms of repairing the item. This may be more recent as a more prevalent idea, but I think the inclination, due to Shinto, has been there for a long time.

[coldtea]

>Most of the content around this technique on the web is not in Japanese

How would one know, except if they do read Japanese and searched their bibliography (including old tomes)?

Merely searching for the japanese version of the term on Google might not be the best way - the Japanese might just implicit use the technique without naming it and writing much about it, for example. Or might have different terms for the practice, and that's just one that caught on in the west as the catch-all term.

Plus it might not been a popular practice there for way over 50+ years (as they had been busy recovering from WWII and modernizing their industry), which is the same time span when westerners discovered it.

[VRay]

Basically nobody in Japan has ever heard of this. Whenever I'm hanging out in Japan and run across another viral post about "The ancient and time-honored Japanese tradition of goldjoin", I ask Japanese people about it in Japanese*

Not once has anyone heard of it.

It's just another fake viral sensation that we cooked up in the USA

There's plenty of historical evidence that it's been done, but it's not some common thing that people in Japan regularly do. Modern Japanese people actually love buying disposable plastic crap, then throwing it out when there's the slightest thing wrong with it.

Since they're right next door to China, they can get a lot of fairly nice plastic stuff at the dollar store. You pop into the 100 yen store, and pay 100 yen +tax for the exact same plastic junk that would cost you $5 to $20 per item at Target or Wal-Mart in the USA

* For the record, I'm not asking "What's kintsugi?", I'm asking "Hey, have you ever heard of this thing where you fix a broken item using gold? Like gold glue?", and I show them the viral post du jour

[coldtea]

>Basically nobody in Japan has ever heard of this. Whenever I'm hanging out in Japan and run across another viral post about "The ancient and time-honored Japanese tradition of goldjoin", I ask Japanese people about it in Japanese Not once has anyone heard of it.*

Almost nobody one would casually ask in Europe has heard of tons of European medieval, renaissance, or even 19th century techniques and terms either.

For example, 99.9% of the people don't know that Chopin is not a classical composer (it's a romantic one) - laymen just call the whole "old orchestral music" thing "classical".

How many know what chiaroscuro (a huge tradition once) means, or what a zither is?

>There's plenty of historical evidence that it's been done, but it's not some common thing that people in Japan regularly do.

Well, it was never a "common thing that people in Japan regularly do". It was a period-specific aesthetic choice of crafts artists.

>I'm asking "Hey, have you ever heard of this thing where you fix a broken item using gold? Like gold glue?", and I show them the viral post du jour

Sorry, someone's story said that modern Japanese would fix pottery using gold as glue?

Most don't even have any expensive pottery, aside household items they use for soup, to drink tea, and stuff. At best they'll have some ordinary vases...

Even TFA says: "a unique form of Japanese art restoration known as kintsugi."

Art restoration - not what Hiroshi Sixpack does to fix his broken tea cup or kitchen plate.

[pezezin]

I'm currently living in Japan, so I asked around... and yes, it's exactly how you described.

[monocasa]

Here's a historical collection.

https://noma.org/kintsugi-reflects-beauty-in-flaws-strength-...

[gregoire]

Thank you!

[modernpink]

Are the pictures of bowls from that period repaired with this technique on the Wikipedia pages enough as historical references or are you looking for something else?

[gregoire]

Most of the kintsugi photos on Wikipedia do not state the date nor the origin of the object they depict, except for one, so I'm looking for something a bit more substantial.

[aonsager]

For what it's worth, I was familiar with this technique before seeing this or other non-Japanese articles. It doesn't have much relevance for daily life now which can explain why very few people seem to have heard of it, but I would imagine that people who study tea ceremony for example would be more likely to know about it.

[kaetemi]

Japanese Word - The art of literal translation of the word ... is pretty much a meme by now.