At midnight the night before I left for Japan to learn kintsugi, the ancient art of repairing broken pottery, my parents’ kitchen cabinet came crashing to the ground. My dog and I slept through the sound in my childhood bedroom, but when we came downstairs the next morning, we found my mom in her robe staring at all the pieces. For decades, the cabinet had held all of my family’s tableware, which had been deeply sentimental and was now obliterated: ceramic pasta bowls from trips to my grandfather’s hometown in Italy, little blue cereal bowls from my mother’s childhood, Christmas gifts, everything turned into jagged puzzle pieces. My mom had stayed up cleaning, throwing everything away in a daze. I told her to let me take some of the pieces with me to Kyoto, where I’d be learning kintsugi from POJ Studio. In addition to selling crafts from artisans across Japan, the brand offers an intensive two-month kintsugi apprenticeship teaching the golden art of tableware repair.
Kintsugi, which means “to join with gold” in Japanese, is an art form, but also a philosophy: one that teaches us how to celebrate and value the imperfect, broken parts of ourselves, rather than disguising them or tossing them away. For hundreds of years, highly skilled kintsugi artisans have mended the shattered pieces of tableware using golden lacquer, made from the resin of urushi trees, to transform fractures into art—while also restoring stability to the piece, allowing them to be functional again.
I decided to leave the plastic bag of bowl shards that I’d schlepped from the States in my suitcase as I headed out along the Kamo River for my first lesson in POJ’s intimate Kyoto studio. Before I touched a drop of lacquer, my instructor, Satoko, had me pick up my pen. In my other hand, I held a dainty practice teacup that was split into two jagged pieces, and I studied it. I’d never looked at something broken so intently. Satoko asked me to sketch a “patient chart” of the two pieces, before having me place thin, delicate tape along all the crooked breaks.
During the formative years of self-myth-making that carried me to adulthood, I solidified ideas about what I’m good at and what I’m bad at. I am bad at precise, beautiful things, I decided, because I am messy and a little careless with fine details. I am good at writing, I decided, because I can faithfully transcribe reality, almost like a robot, if robots were vulnerable to insecurity. In early 2023, I was diagnosed with an advanced blood cancer, which I spent the entire year fighting with high-dose chemotherapy and nearly a dozen surgeries. I lost so many pieces of myself: hair, a lymph node, friends, blood, money, eggs, energy, joy. In a support group for young adult cancer patients this year, the leader prompted us to creatively write about our experiences for five minutes and I sat silently, hands clammy. When it became my turn to share, I told my peers that it was too much pressure. I hadn’t wanted to start something I couldn’t make perfect, even in the supportive, low-stakes setting of a group of nearly dying strangers.
Satoko called the design that the breaks made “scenery,” adding a welcome air of romance to the chaotic physics of fracture propagation. After I finished taping the pieces, my back ached from sitting upright for an hour with none of the lying-down breaks I’m accustomed to. I applied an urushi sap-based glue with a fine brush, carefully and precisely along each irregular break, and I pushed the pieces together. The cup would sit in the “muro” kiln for a week, essentially a humid chest, because urushi sap cures and hardens when exposed to moisture. The entire repair process of a single broken cup, which ends with the application of the lacquer, takes around three months. Each step requires extreme precision, then near-godly patience, as the piece returns to the muro to harden after each step. But the mesmerizing end result—of glorious, impossible-to-replicate scenery that dances across a piece of tableware—proves the merit of spending time with breakage. Unlike most Western repair techniques, which aim to mimic the original as if nothing happened, each rupture in kintsugi is prized, even before it becomes “beautiful” again in the final stage.
Amazingly, kintsugi is impossible to streamline or quicken. You can’t design fractures, either. When I asked my instructor how to create good breaks to make beautiful kintsugi, she said, no, you can’t do that. Kintsugi artists accept that the universe will continue chipping plates, cups, and bowls. To create this beautiful, rarefied thing, it is a requirement that something “bad” has happened to it, purely by chance.
Tina Koyama, who founded POJ Studio in 2020, often refers to the “kintsugi ecosystem,” which includes urushi harvesters and refiners like Takuya Tsutsumi, a fourth-generation urushi refiner who follows the slow, traditional methods in his Kyoto shop and refinery. (Harvesting urushi, a practice in Japan for nearly 10,000 years, is an even slower, more painstaking process than kintsugi itself, which is why Japanese urushi lacquer grows ever more rare: Each cut to the tree only extracts a few grams of sap, and you must wait another four weeks to make the next cut, to give the tree time to recover.) “It should really be called urushi-tsugi,” Koyama told me over lunch. “The kin, meaning gold, is more ornamental.” This year, in response to American interest, she opened a POJ pop-up in LA, which will offer kintsugi classes outside of the two-month apprenticeship, until the end of January.
I showed my instructor a photo of my mother’s cabinet and the covered floor. I asked if it was possible to repair ceramics that have giant pieces missing. Can you create new pieces to fill in the gaps? Using a mixture of wet stone and urushi sap, kintsugi artists can fill in chips, but not giant shards, explained Satoko. There are fractures that are too severe, too massive to beautify with kintsugi. I wilted. I’d wanted the kintsugi metaphor to work for me. Cancer has made me feel uglier, more gruesome, even as I continue my painstaking recovery. Not all breaks can be beautiful lessons, or end in redemption. But the practice of gently attending to broken parts—of treating them with care, respect, and patience—is something I’ve wanted so badly for myself.
Because my apprenticeship was condensed to just a few days, I wouldn’t get to work on my piece from beginning to end, take it from broken to whole. But those few days were enough for me to get lost in its slowness. Kintsugi requires a full-body attention to details—crucially, details outside of one’s own self—that I found meditative. Every minute I spent studying a broken tea cup was a minute I wasn’t doom-scrolling MyChart or buying athleisure to self-soothe, but rather finding a bit of peace in my own body. This holiday season, that felt like enough.