[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.