The Beauty of Broken Things: The Artist Using Kintsugi To Heal Emotional Wounds

Tokyo Weekender

7 days ago

This article appeared in Tokyo Weekender Vol. 2, 2025.
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On a quiet side street in Tokyo's Ogikubo neighborhood, sunlight streams through the windows of a small antique studio filled with ceramic fragments, brushes, powdered gold and bowls in various stages of repair. The air carries the earthy scent of lacquer while the yellow and silver trains of the Chuo-Sobu Line occasionally rumble by.
This is the workplace and studio of kintsugi artist and teacher Yuki Otani. If you're even slightly interested in Japanese culture, you're likely familiar with the concept of kintsugi: the practice of repairing broken pottery with lacquer and gold, highlighting cracks rather than hiding them. Despite being a centuries-old practice, it resonates strongly with many people today, both within and outside Japan. It's easy to understand why; kintsugi offers a potent visual metaphor, an acknowledgment and honoring of fractures, an understanding that healing has its own unique beauty.
Otani, who goes by the name 'Kintsugi Lady' online, uses ceramic repair as a conduit for emotional renewal. Her students, she notes, are often not just mending broken pottery, but healing parts of themselves.
List of Contents:
Golden Scars
Fixing More Than Objects
A Reverence for Imperfection
A Future Melded Together
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Golden Scars
The word 'kintsugi' came into Otani's life during a period of recovery and reflection. Amid the stillness that followed a major surgery, she came across a simple phrase that resonated deeply: 'All my scars are golden.' The phrase is from 'Kintsugi,' a song by British singer-songwriter Gabrielle Aplin. The words gave shape to feelings she hadn't yet been able to fully face — the quiet ache of a body changed and the sense that the future she had once imagined was beginning to slip away. Her physical scars were healing little by little, but she didn't yet know how to tend to the wounds in her heart. The words worked like a quiet remedy — something she hadn't known she needed.
That realization drew her to try kintsugi for herself. In learning to mend ceramics with gold, she began to see how care and beauty can emerge from change. For Otani, it became its own remedy — reminding her not to strive to erase her pain, but rather to live alongside it with grace. 'To me,' she says, 'kintsugi is a way of letting time become part of the beauty.'
As her understanding of kintsugi deepened, Otani — who splits her time between Japan and the United Kingdom — began to notice its quiet echoes in her own cross-cultural life. 'My life itself feels like kintsugi,' she says. 'Not fully one thing or another, but a space in-between where different values meet and something new is created.'
Otani's works often blend materials from both Japan and the UK. One notable piece is a Japanese teacup fused with a shard of British ceramic she found at a London flea market. It fit perfectly, as if by fate. This form of kintsugi is called yobitsugi, or 'call-and-join,' where a missing piece is replaced not by the original but by something wholly different.
'It's about finding harmony through what's been carried forward,' she says. 'It's also about gently honoring what something has been while listening closely to what it might become.'
Fixing More Than Objects
Kintsugi Lady's workshops, held in Tokyo, London and occasionally elsewhere, are about far more than technique. Participants come from all over the world, bringing with them not only broken bowls and cups but sometimes also fractured pieces of themselves.
A woman attending her first workshop in Japan remained quiet through the session, silently concentrating. She returned a few days later and began to share her story, telling Otani that her home country was in the midst of war. Something about the process of kintsugi had spoken to her — not in words, but in the quiet, attentive rhythm of repair.
'My country is now in the middle of conflict, but one day, when things are stable, I want you to come teach kintsugi there,' she told Otani. That parting promise — 'Let's meet again' — felt like kintsugi itself.
'It felt like we were both trying to tend to our hibi — a Japanese word that means both 'daily life' and 'cracks' — with care, and carry them toward a better future,' Otani says.
In another session, a British woman painstakingly repaired a vase that belonged to a shop she once ran with her late husband; a honeymooning couple mended a mug full of memories; a mother and daughter from Taiwan laughed about the plate their cat had broken, now transformed into a 'collaborative art piece.' Even an office worker in a business suit, emotionally drained from her work, left a workshop saying, 'Kintsugi blew all my stress away.'
These moments, Otani says, are proof that kintsugi isn't just about objects — it's a way of being. 'It's a lens for how we see the beauty in the world, and how we choose to live in it.'
A Reverence for Imperfection
In a world driven by disposability and constant consumption, kintsugi asks us not only to consider what we throw away but to reflect on why we do so. 'People often think it makes sense to replace what's broken,' Otani says. 'But kintsugi invites us to pause, to touch the flaw and to listen to the story it carries.' Often, she adds, the pieces that undergo kintsugi aren't antiques or art objects but rather everyday things like bowls, plates and cups — items with quiet histories and personal significance.
In this way, kintsugi becomes not only a sustainable practice but a form of emotional ecology — a way of reimagining how we define care, worth and connection.
Otani has also begun incorporating materials that reflect this way of thinking into her artistic practice. Through a kintsugi volunteer initiative in the earthquake-affected Noto Peninsula, she met people who harvest and refine urushi — the natural lacquer essential to the craft. 'Many of the people I've met there, who harvest and refine urushi, are not only the foundation of this tradition, but also survivors. Despite the hardship, they continue working to protect what's been passed down.'
She now uses some of that lacquer in her workshops, allowing participants to connect with Noto not just through stories but through the material itself — letting their hands encounter a place and its people through the act of mending. This experience also led her to begin planting her own lacquer trees, nurturing a future in which people, craft and nature grow together.
A Future Melded Together
Otani is currently developing workshops in collaboration with overseas museums and educational institutions, and she hopes to publish a book that captures her reflections and experiences through the lens of kintsugi. Her approach is not about instruction, but about creating open spaces where people can explore and respond to the practice in their own way — through the textures of their personal stories and cultural backgrounds.
'Kintsugi is about fixing — but it's never fixed,' she says. 'It takes many forms. It's simply a quiet way to care for something loved. For some, it's art. For others, a path to healing. What matters is that each person can find their own way into it.'
More Info
At Gallery Rokujigen in Ogikubo, Otani offers a simplified, one-day version of her kintsugi sessions. To book, DM her
on Instagram
.
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