Latest / It's All Japanese to Me / Ep. 4 — Kintsugi: mending with lacquer and gold

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Ep. 4 — Kintsugi: mending with lacquer and gold · It's All Japanese to Me

• 0:06
  SPEAKER_00: Hello, I'm Rikuto.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_00: So today's word is kintsugi.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_00: Kin in Japanese means gold and tsugi comes from tsugu, to join or to connect.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_00: So kintsugi is literally meaning joining or connecting with gold.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_00: So this word I believe is already quite well known in English,
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_00: so this time I would like to start with what dictionaries are saying.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_00: The digital daijisen,
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_00: a Japanese dictionary,
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: describes kintsugi as a way of repairing pottery that has cracked or chipped.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_00: The pieces are joined with urushi, Japanese lacquer.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_00: Then gold, silver or platinum powder is sprinkled onto the seams to decorate them.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_00: The dictionary calls it a repair method unique to Japan.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_00: It also gives another name for it, kintsukuroi, which means mending with gold.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_00: So actually the gold is only on the surface and what holds the pieces together is the lacquer.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_00: The same entry has one more sentence I would like to share.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_00: It says that the seams after the repair are called keshiki.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_00: Keshiki usually means landscape or scenery in Japanese,
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_00: and people enjoy the new look,
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_00: which is different from how the pieces looked before it broke.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_00: So the line of the repair is seen almost like a view you look at.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_00: The dictionary also notes that today synthetic adhesives are sometimes used instead of lacquer.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_00: By the way, in English, the word seems to be very new.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_00: Merriam-Webster gives its first known use in English as 2008.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_00: And in Google Books,
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_00: the word appears many times more often in recent years than it did around 2010.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, that is a quick look at Kintsugi from the dictionary side.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_00: Personally, I think of Kintsugi as a way for a piece to show that it is one of a kind.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_00: The crack or the chip is something that happened to that piece.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_00: No other piece has been through exactly the same thing.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_00: And in that way, Kintsugi shows that the piece cannot be replaced by any other.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_00: When I look at a mended piece,
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_00: the golden lines sometimes look like they are celebrating that the piece is one of
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_00: a kind.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_00: And it's only my impression, but I think it is one aspect of its beauty.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_00: I believe there is a lot more to it than I can cover.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, but this is it for today's episode about Kintsugi.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you very much for listening and see you next time.
• 3:50
  [music]