On a recent day, a non-Japanese citizen was using a brush to dust cracks in a bowl with gold in an indirectly lit space with a warm ambience on the second floor of a building in Tokyo.

Matias Canosa, a 39-year-old Argentinian, was attending a "kintsugi" workshop in the “Rokujigen” (Sixth dimension) gallery located close to Ogikubo Station in Suginami Ward, which was seen lined with antiquated wooden desks and chairs.

Kintsugi is a traditional Japanese craft technique that utilizes lacquer and gold to repair broken ceramic pieces.

Kunio Nakamura, the 52-year-old kintsugi artist who operates Rokujigen, called out to Canosa, saying: “Gently, slowly.”

Canosa, a resident of Tokyo, had come to Japan in October to study Japanese. He said he learned about kintsugi some 10 years ago and had tried to practice the technique at his home by himself alone.

In kintsugi, practitioners don’t throw away something just because it is broken, but instead they accept everything about it, including its past and present, and refinish it into something unique, Canosa said.

He added that he finds that philosophy particularly wonderful.

Kintsugi has been drawing the attention of world audiences over the past several years by virtue of both its artisanal quality and the mentality that underlies it.

MENDING MENTAL SCARS

Canosa worked as a photographer in Spain before coming to Japan.

Even failed photographs mean a lot to a person if they contain good stories, he said, adding that perhaps that feeling has something in common with kintsugi.

Rokujigen’s kintsugi workshops are attended by both Japanese and a number of foreign visitors, many of them being Westerners.

Nakamura, the gallery operator, regularly goes on business trips to the United States to give on-site lessons there. He said some of the participants of his workshops have shed tears while repairing flawed ceramic pieces.

He has recently received lesson requests from countries neighboring war-torn Ukraine and Israel, Nakamura added.

“People probably feel ‘purified’ or ‘forgiven’ as they think of the pottery works as their own selves and face up to their own hearts,” Nakamura said. “Those who practice kintsugi are perhaps, in fact, hoping to mend their own mental scars.”

MODEL-TURNED-ARTIST

Kintsugi artists are active outside Japan as well in recent years, including Tatiane Freitas, 39, who resides in Sao Paulo in Brazil on the opposite side of the globe.

Freitas, who grew up in a small town in the southeast Brazilian state of Minas Gerais, was about 15 when she became a professional model in Sao Paulo.

Her modeling work went so well that she was even featured on a magazine cover.

As a model, however, Freitas had to maintain her external beauty all the time. She grew increasingly uncomfortable with her daily life, as she refrained from eating all meat except chicken so she wouldn’t put on extra weight and spent time studying which cosmetic products were better.

Freitas studied fashion as a university student.

Clothes, however, have a maximum life span of only about six months in the fashion industry, where the mainstream is “fast fashion” of mass production and mass consumption. She saw new pieces of clothing emerge one after another, whereas old ones were being thrown away.

“I had to maintain my outward appearance all the time,” Freitas said. “I had to consume a lot to wear clothes that matched the trend of the time. The modeling world always demanded perfection and that suffocated me a lot.”

One day around that time, Freitas happened to see a broken chair left abandoned in a shooting studio. She fell into a strange sensation the moment she saw it.

Perhaps the chair could be reborn into a work of art if different material was used to make up for the missing parts, she thought at the time.

She said she learned later that the concept was what kintsugi is about.

YOU DON’T HAVE TO BE PERFECT

Freitas retired from professional modeling at the age of 21 and chose to become an artist.

Kintsugi typically refers to the art of using lacquer to repair broken pottery pieces, but Freitas chose to apply the technique to common pieces of furniture, such as chairs, desks and ladders.

That was partly inspired by her grandfather, who was a furniture maker, Freitas said.

She takes over broken pieces of furniture from others and uses transparent acrylic plates to repair their missing parts. She said the unbroken parts refer to the past, whereas the transparent acrylic plates in the repaired parts represent the future.

“Our future is transparent and can take up any color,” she said. “I wish to show through my expression that it is up to you to take any path.”

Freitas has shown kintsugi-ed furniture at exhibitions both in Brazil and abroad, for which she has earned acclaim. She said she is placing more emphasis on artworks for appreciation than on practical utility.

“All humans are incomplete and nobody is perfect,” she said. “Likewise, all my kintsugi-ed works are incomplete and don’t look like their original forms. Kintsugi is sending out the message to us that we don’t have to be perfect.”

Freitas continued: “I hope the concept of kintsugi, the pride of Japan, will spread further across the world, all the more because we live in this age where outward looks matter so much amid the spread of social media.”

(This article was written by Yuko Kawasaki in Tokyo and Rihito Karube in Sao Paulo.)