Examples of kintsugi you can find in Tokyo museums

Tokyo museums rarely put kintsugi in a title. The repair appears in the small print of an object record, where a curator notes that a vessel was mended after it broke. That is why a search for examples of kintsugi in a museum database returns very few results, and why the best strategy is to learn the phrases that labels use rather than a single word.

The wording varies. One Tokyo National Museum record says a piece was repaired using a traditional technique known as kintsugi, which it translates as gold mending, while another lists the material as stoneware with repairs in gold lacquer.^1,3 A third describes the glue and the powder in plain terms, which is the clearest description of the method you will find on a label.²

So when you walk a gallery, look for words such as gold lacquer, gold mending, lacquer repair and mended. Then look at the object itself, because the seams show as thin gold lines that follow the break. The pieces below are the ones we could confirm in the museum's own collection records, which is a firmer footing than a tourist rumor.

If you want the object at the heart of the kintsugi legend, look for Bakohan. The e-Museum database lists it as a Longquan ware celadon bowl, height 9.6 and aperture 15.4, from the Southern Song period, 13th century, held by the Tokyo National Museum as TG-2354.⁴ The record says it was once owned by the shogun Ashikaga Yoshimasa, who cracked it on the bottom and sent it to China for an exchange.¹¹

The bowl came back with the crack fastened by a large clamp that looked like a locust, and so it was named Bakohan, large-locust clamp.¹² This is not kintsugi, which uses lacquer and gold, but it is the repair that the legend says pushed Japanese craftsmen to find a more beautiful way to mend. The e-Museum account draws on a record written in 1727 by the scholar Ito Togai.¹³

Treat the bowl as a historical object first and a story second. It is a Chinese celadon with a clamp, valued in Japan partly because of that repair. Our history page lays out how the legend connects to the Muromachi tea rooms, and where the sources hold back from calling it the origin of kintsugi. If the bowl is not on display, the e-Museum photographs and text are the next best thing.

Train your eye before the visit. In kintsugi, Japan Up Close explains, the pieces are glued, then gold powder is dusted or dabbed along the cracks and clings to the glue that seeps out, so the seam is a slightly raised, irregular golden line.²⁰ Admirers called the result keshiki, scenery, because the seam reads like a river across the bowl.²¹

Different repairs look different. A clamp, as on the Bakohan bowl, shows as metal staples bridging the crack.¹² An ordinary item mended in the yakitsugi technique used lead glass instead and was not a tea ceremony piece.²² A lacquer seam without gold looks dark, because the lacquer itself is the visible part. When a label says repairs in gold lacquer, expect a line of gold along the join.³

Never touch a case. The point of a visit is to look at how the repair follows the break, how wide the seam is and how it changes the plate. Then, if you want to feel the process yourself rather than only look at it, book a class: our Asakusa workshop is listed as a 1-hour session using real urushi lacquer and gold powder, and it starts a short walk from Senso-ji.