Where the Lacquer Holds: Yoko Furuya and the Craft of Kintsugi
BeART World JOURNAL — Stories about the people behind what we value.
A black matcha bowl from Aizu-Hongo, glazed with a deep blue, has broken. The quickest answer would be glue, or a replacement. In Yoko Furuya's hands, the answer takes much longer.
The fragments are joined with urushi, the natural lacquer used in Japanese lacquerware. Then come the decisions that separate restoration from simple repair. Furuya-san drew delicate lines in white urushi to bring out the contrast between the black glaze and the blue. She applied raden (mother-of-pearl) to enhance the bowl's natural design. Made in the Showa period and restored in 2020, the bowl is whole again. It is not the bowl it was before it broke, and it was never meant to be.
This is kintsugi as Yoko Furuya (古屋容子, Furuya Yoko) practices it. Many people outside Japan now know the word, usually through a single image: a ceramic vessel crossed by bright golden lines. That image is real, but it shows only the final layer of the work. Underneath it are questions that each object asks again:
Which lacquer, and how many layers?
Should the line be gold, silver, black, or white?
Should the surface stay quiet, or carry decoration?
How much of the object's original character (its glaze, its maker's intention, the tradition it belongs to) should remain in charge?
Furuya-san is a kintsugi master, an instructor, and the President of the International Kintsugi Association. Her work sits where making and teaching meet. She restores individual objects, and she makes sure the knowledge needed to restore them does not stop with her.
Learning the Language of Lacquer
In 2005, Furuya-san began studying under the maki-e master Makoto Koike.
The detail matters. Maki-e is a traditional Japanese technique of decorating lacquer with fine metal powders. Under Koike, she studied traditional lacquer work, maki-e, and kintsugi. Her training in maki-e and traditional lacquer work gave her a foundation in urushi craftsmanship that informed her later kintsugi practice.
That foundation matters because urushi is not a paint or an adhesive in the everyday sense:
It is a tree sap that hardens through a slow chemical process that depends on warmth and humidity, not simply by drying in the air.
It must be applied in thin layers, each given time to cure before the next.
Raw urushi can also irritate the skin.
In traditional urushi-based kintsugi, this material does much of the essential work. It bonds the fragments, fills the gaps where pieces are missing, and builds up the seam. Where a metal finish is used, it also holds the powder that makes the line visible.
The chain is simple to describe and difficult to master. The material demands patience. Patience makes technique possible. Technique makes a lasting repair. And a lasting repair is what allows an object to be preserved and used again. Understanding urushi is therefore not background knowledge for a kintsugi practitioner. It is the craft itself.
From Practice to Kintsugi Master
In 2009, Furuya-san started her own practice as a kintsugi master. This is the point at which learning becomes responsibility. A student's mistakes stay in the workshop. A practitioner's work returns to its owner, to be handled, admired, and often used. A restored tea bowl has to hold liquid again; a repaired dish has to survive daily life. Every choice about lacquer, layering, and finish now has consequences outside the studio.
It is also where individual judgment begins to show. Two practitioners trained in the same methods will not necessarily restore the same bowl in the same way. The line of a seam can follow a crack exactly or be subtly shaped. A missing fragment can be rebuilt in plain lacquer or treated as an opportunity for decoration. Those decisions, repeated across many objects, gradually become a recognizable practice.
When Repair Became a Way of Teaching
Then, in 2011, came the Great East Japan Earthquake. The earthquake created a significant need to repair household and cherished objects. For people whose objects of personal or cultural value had been damaged, repair offered a way to keep what might otherwise have been discarded.
For Furuya-san, this became an important turning point, and she began to share her knowledge through teaching. Kintsugi, in this light, is not only a service performed for others. It can be a skill that people learn in order to care for their own objects.
From that point, teaching became part of her work alongside restoration.
More Than Gold Lines
Look closely at the works Furuya-san has restored, and the familiar picture of kintsugi quickly widens.
Oribe ware. Oribe is a style associated with the bold tastes of the Momoyama-period tea master Furuta Oribe. On an Oribe ware matcha bowl, she used no gold at all. The cracks were restored in black urushi, which gives them a strong, dark outline against the deep green glaze. Along the seams she inlaid raden, a decorative technique traditionally associated with lacquerware, placing each small piece of shell by hand. As the light moves, the colors in the shell shift.
Arita ware, green glaze. On a Showa-period bowl, she used silver powder to depict a flowing river, and added raden to catch the light like moving water.
Arita ware, red. On a bowl restored in 2021, black lacquer lines give the seams smooth, deliberate curves against the red.
Across her work, the materials vary from piece to piece: gold, silver, black and white urushi, mother-of-pearl. So do the ceramic traditions, among them Arita, Oribe, Aizu-Hongo, and celadon, many of them in the form of matcha bowls.
What connects these pieces is not a signature color but an approach. Restoration here is an artistic act, but one that works with the original object rather than over it. The glaze, the form, and the tradition a bowl comes from set the terms. The repair answers them.
The Object Remembers
There is a common way of explaining kintsugi through wabi-sabi, often summarized as finding beauty in imperfection. It is one way people interpret aspects of Japanese aesthetics, and it helps some readers approach the craft. But it can also make kintsugi sound like a philosophy first and a practice second, and it tends to make every repaired bowl tell the same story.
Furuya-san's work suggests something more specific. A restored bowl carries at least two histories at once:
Its making: a kiln tradition, a period, a potter's choices about glaze and shape.
Its life: the break, and the careful work that followed.
Kintsugi does not hide the second history. Each crack becomes part of the object's visible record.
In her restorations, the skill lies in keeping both histories legible. A repair that overwhelms the bowl can obscure its origin. A repair that disappears can obscure what happened to it. Between those two lies the judgment visible in her work, and it is judgment that cannot be learned from a single photograph of a golden seam.
Passing Knowledge Forward
In 2021, Furuya-san established the International Kintsugi Association. Through the Association, she has worked to share traditional lacquer-based kintsugi and to train new practitioners, through repair work, lectures, talks, and classes. She teaches kintsugi courses in Japan. She has also made instructions available online, starting with basic repairs such as mending a very small chip.
She has also written a book for newcomers, Kintsugi: Invitation to the Handwork of Kintsugi (Mending with Gold) For Beginners. Like her classes, it is another way of placing the first steps of the craft in other people's hands.
This points to a broader question for any living craft: how does knowledge survive? A restored bowl can last for generations, but it cannot teach anyone how it was made. Knowledge of urushi lives in people: how it behaves, how long it needs, how it fails. That knowledge moves from one practitioner to the next. Furuya-san learned it from a master. Her teaching continues that same chain, passing the techniques she learned to new practitioners.
Teaching has therefore become an important part of her practice.
Kintsugi in Contemporary Life
It would be easy to present kintsugi as a simple answer to modern waste. The reality is more interesting, because repair carries several different kinds of value:
Environmental. Repairing an object and continuing to use it is a choice against disposal. It means one less replacement, and it keeps materials in use.
Cultural. A repaired Showa-period bowl remains a document of a kiln tradition and of the people who used it. Discard it, and that record goes too.
Craft. A repair done with urushi takes time, skill, and knowledge that a quick fix does not.
These kinds of value do not all point in the same direction. Traditional kintsugi is slow. It asks the owner to wait, and to decide that an object is worth the time, skill, and knowledge involved in its repair.
For contemporary audiences, her work offers a concrete example of what it means to repair, preserve, and continue using an object, while keeping the knowledge behind that process alive.
Selected Exhibitions and Publications
Selected exhibitions
Otowa Gallery, Tokyo — May 2024
Gallery Ri Kasho, Shizuoka — March 2024
Matsuzakaya Shizuoka Store, BlancCUBE, Shizuoka — February 2024
Artana Kura, Shizuoka — October 2023
Gallery Abend, Yamanashi — September 2023
Gallery Slowboat, Tokyo — June 2023
Numazu Goyotei, Shizuoka — November 2022
Gallery Art Space Aoki, Shizuoka — March 2020
Fujimura Memorial Hall (Kofu City Designated Cultural Property), Yamanashi — December 2018
Publication
Kintsugi: Invitation to the Handwork of Kintsugi (Mending with Gold) For Beginners
About the Creator
Yoko Furuya (古屋容子) is a Japanese kintsugi master, instructor, and President of the International Kintsugi Association. In 2005, she began studying under the maki-e master Makoto Koike, training in traditional lacquer, maki-e, and kintsugi. She started her own practice as a kintsugi master in 2009.
Following the Great East Japan Earthquake in 2011, she began teaching kintsugi. In 2021, she established the International Kintsugi Association. Her restorations combine urushi with gold, silver, black and white lacquer, and raden across a range of Japanese ceramic traditions.
Her work has been exhibited in Tokyo, Shizuoka, and Yamanashi. She is the author of Kintsugi: Invitation to the Handwork of Kintsugi (Mending with Gold) For Beginners.
Explore Yoko Furuya's Work →
At BeART World JAPAN, we are interested in more than the finished object. We want to know:
who made it;
what they learned, and from whom;
what materials they chose;
what the object has been through.
With Furuya-san's work, all of these are visible in a single seam.
Each of her restored pieces arrives with its own story: the ceramic tradition it comes from, the period in which it was made, and the choices she made in bringing it back into use.
