What to use for kintsugi, from the lacquer to the last dust of gold

Ask what to use for kintsugi, the Japanese art of repairing broken ceramics with gold, and the honest answer is a short list with a long wait attached. Web Japan puts the method in one sentence: reattach the broken pieces with urushi lacquer, fill the cracked or chipped parts with a putty of urushi mixed with sawdust or powdered stone, and finish with gold powder.² Everything else in the craft is a variation on those three jobs.

The classical technique, the one that was perfected in the Edo period, keeps even that list natural: urushi produced in Japan, rice powder and mountain soil.⁵ There is no solvent and no hardener in it. The lacquer does the gluing, the rice powder thickens it and the soil gives body to the filler. That is a very different shopping list from a modern hardware store, and it explains why a proper repair is slow, quiet work.

The proof is in old pieces. Web Japan points to repaired items more than 200 years old that are still intact as evidence of how durable those natural materials are.⁶ That durability is also why the craft cannot be hurried. Each material below earns its place by lasting, and each one asks something of the person who handles it, which is where the rest of this page picks up.

The adhesive is made by mixing ki-urushi, filtered raw lacquer, with wheat flour or rice paste.⁸ LACMA's conservator describes the same idea: in the traditional process urushi is the binder, with rice glue, that holds the fragments together.²⁵ The flour or rice gives the sticky lacquer enough body to bridge a hairline join. Kintsugi explained at the bench comes down to that: glue, fill, finish.

Where a chip or a whole fragment is missing, the gap is filled with an urushi putty made with fine sawdust or abrasive clay powder.¹⁰ A maki-e studio quoted by JNTO glues the damaged pieces with kokuso-nori, a kokuso urushi glue, lets them dry and polishes them flat before the next layer.²⁶ The names change between workshops, but the logic is the same: build the missing volume, then smooth it.

Earth is a quiet ingredient in lacquerwork. In Wajima lacquerware a base coat of urushi is mixed with ji-no-ko, a ground earth made from diatomaceous earth that is baked and ground into powder.²⁷ Web Japan's account of kintsugi names rice powder and mountain soil in the same way.⁵ If a studio mentions tonoko or ji-no-ko, that is the earth.

The Viator record for our Gion workshop says the price includes tools and space to do kintsugi, and that a plates upgrade option is available. You repair a ceramic bowl or plate using traditional urushi lacquer and gold powder, according to the record, and the instructor has you clean the cracks, join the pieces, apply gold to the repaired lines and finish the piece to take home.

What the record does not say is which steps are done in advance. JNTO's listing of a one-hour Tokyo studio explains the trade-off: the curing of urushi is very slow, so a one-hour experience of traditional kintsugi is highly uncommon.³⁶ In that studio the tableware has been partially restored in advance and each participant applies the finishing layer.³⁷ A 90-minute class has the same arithmetic to solve.

So ask three things at the bench: which powder is on the table, whether the lacquer is natural urushi or a quicker substitute, and which steps were done before you arrived. The class begins at $18 per person, which is a fair price to learn what is in your own piece before you decide to buy a kit.