The dish is made of very fine clay with some small spots of grit in the clay that can be seen on the back of the plate. There are also firing spurs on the back of the plate – these made by small bits of clay placed between dishes so that they would fire evenly in the kiln. At some point in its life the plate was broken into two pieces and then repaired with a thick lacquer seam. This type of elegant Japanese gold lacquer repair is known as “kintsugi” (metal repair of gold or silver lacquer) or, more specifically, “kinnaoshi” (which designates gold lacquer repair specifically). It is not unusual to see gold lacquer repairs to various Japanese ceramics—and to Korean and Chinese wares which have passed through Japanese collections. Certain knowledgeable collectors esteem such repairs – we have even heard them referred to by a Japanese collector as “honorable wrinkles". I personally think it is a great tribute to such a piece that the owners valued it enough to repair it with an obvious repair rather than try to do a restoration wherein the repair cannot be seen.

The Smithsonian’s Freer Gallery of Art once held an exhibit called the “Golden Seams: The Japanese Art of Mending Ceramics”. Exactly when golden kintsugi repairs began is unknown, Cort, the exhibits curator, says. An incident involving an heirloom owned by the shogun (commander) Ashikaga Yoshimasa(1434-1490), however, may have encouraged development of the technique. A Chinese celadon tea bowl prized by the shogun’s family was broken and sent back to China to be repaired. It was returned to Japan with disfiguring metal staples holding it together—at the time, staples were a common and practical way to repair ceramics in China.

The Japanese were shocked to find large chunky staples stuck into the delicate bowl,” Cort says. Within a century, repairs using lacquer combined with powdered gold or silver became common in Japan. Sometimes owners even commissioned lavish maki-e, or ‘sprinkled picture’ decoration to replace large fragments. In this practice, artisans replaced a missing fragment of a broken bowl by crafting a new piece with built-up layers of lacquer.

The Matsugatani kiln came from Oji in the province of Hizen. Old Nabeshima porcelains, such as Matsugatani porcelain, were considered to be the origin of Nabeshima porcelain. In 1675, the local Nabeshima family who ruled Arita established an official kiln to make top-quality enamelware porcelain for the upper classes in Japan, which came to be called Nabeshima ware. After 1757, the Arita kilns filled domestic needs only.