Repair and Reuse: Crafting New Stories from the Old
How Japan’s traditions of repairing and reusing have survived generations, connecting with modern movements of sustainability.
Finding continuity in discontinuity. The practice of transforming worn materials into something new, what is now called “upcycling” or “creative reuse”, has long existed across cultures. From quilting and patchwork in Europe and North America to techniques like sakiori or boro in Japan, many traditions have embraced the value of repair and reinvention. In Japan, especially, this ethos often carries a quiet aesthetic dimension, where imperfection and transience are thoughtfully integrated into an object’s evolving narrative. Repair is a gesture imbued with respect, memory, and beauty. Whether it involves patched textiles, re-glued ceramics, or recycled materials, each worn object becomes the medium for a story in which the traces of use are honored.
Embroidering, weaving, sewing, and reinforcing, these gestures reflect a relationship with the world shaped by patience, attention to the material, and intergenerational transmission. They reveal a different way of thinking about time, care, and creation. In certain Japanese craft traditions, repair is seen not as erasure, but as a way to acknowledge an object’s life, preserving its marks of time while allowing it to continue in a renewed form. As contemporary issues of sustainability, circularity, and degrowth challenge our modes of production and consumption, these traditional skills appear strikingly relevant today.
These philosophies continue to thrive today, thanks to the revival of historical practices and their reinvention by contemporary creators, designers, and architects. By weaving the past with the future, they open up new ways of inhabiting the world.
The Elegance of Mended Fabric: The Art of Boro
At first glance, boro may seem unassuming, a patched, aged fabric woven with worn threads and faded blues. But upon closer inspection, it embodies a philosophy of repair that transcends necessity and borders on the poetic. The word boro, which literally means “rag” or “cloth”, refers to a craft technique born of necessity but which has evolved over time into a true textile art. These garments or blankets are made from multiple layers of salvaged fabric, assembled through patient mending and topstitching, often using sashiko stitch, a simple and regular embroidery pattern originally intended for practical purposes.
This craft emerged in rural Japan, particularly in Tohoku, in the northeast of Honshu, between the 17th and 19th centuries. In these impoverished regions, harsh climatic conditions and limited resources force families to preserve every piece of fabric, often dyed with indigo (aizome) for its antibacterial and insect-repellent properties. Cotton, then rare and expensive in the north of the country, was recycled from generation to generation. Each piece of boro thus tells a family story, a palimpsest of daily life, care, and silent perseverance, expressing a form of radical elegance of the assumed visible, of time made palpable. The visible seams, the layering of patterns, the play of textures and shadows create a pictorial surface, where fragility becomes strength.
Nowadays, boro is experiencing a genuine revival. Long associated with poverty and thus devalued in the postwar period, it is now exhibited in museums (such as the Chichibu-Meisen Museum in Saitama), studied by anthropologists, and rediscovered by contemporary Japanese and foreign designers. It embodies a form of gentle resistance to planned obsolescence, aesthetic standardization, and consumerist frenzy. At a time when the textile industry is one of the most polluting in the world, the philosophy of boro invites us to slow down, observe, and offers an aesthetic of time, care, and transformation. A mended fabric, because it carries within it the memory of the gestures, hands, and lives that have passed through it, becomes all the more precious.
Reinventing from the Worn: The Renaissance of Sakiori
If boro tells a story of survival and transmission through repair, sakiori embodies the art of transforming the worn into a new material, both humble and vibrant. The term sakiori comes from the words saku, meaning “to tear”, and ori, “to weave”. This technique involves cutting worn textiles (often kimonos or workwear) into thin strips, then reweaving them on a handloom with a traditional warp thread. The result is a dense, irregular, richly textured fabric whose hues intertwine with unexpected pictorial depth.
Sakiori originated in the rural regions of northern Japan, particularly in the prefectures of Aomori, Yamagata, and Niigata, where winters are long and harsh. At a time when quality fibers like silk or cotton were reserved for the urban elite, farmers in these regions, constrained by limited resources, developed this ingenious method to extend the life of their used fabrics. Sakiori thus made it possible to create strong, warm, and durable fabrics, used to make work coats, belts, and blankets.
Today, some artisans perpetuate this ancestral know-how while incorporating it into a contemporary dynamic. Unique pieces, often handmade, are finding their way into the circuits of textile design, responsible fashion, and artistic crafts. This revival is part of a broader awareness of the value of old materials and the need to move beyond a linear production/consumption logic. Sakiori thus becomes the medium for new expressions, offering an aesthetic of the fragment, the recomposed, the unexpected, a way of making work with what seemed useless.
Between Transmission and Transformation
From this perspective, we can understand the practice of kintsugi, literally “golden joinery”. Well-known today outside of Japan, this method involves repairing broken ceramics by highlighting their fracture lines with urushi lacquer mixed with gold, silver, or platinum powder. But this philosophy does not apply solely to objects, it reflects a broader attitude toward life and time.
In many contemporary workshops, particularly those that restore antique objects, this approach continues. Several schools or companies train artisans but also amateurs in the patient practice of repair. In Tokyo and Kyoto, some artists are now integrating the principles of kintsugi into contemporary installations, subverting the tradition to better explore its universal significance. If kintsugi attracts the attention of the general public today, it is often for its symbolic aspects of healing, resilience, and embracing imperfection. But in Japanese culture, this symbolism is never dissociated from the technical gesture, the rigor of learning, and humility before the material. Kintsugi requires time, slowness, and repetition. It implicitly teaches a certain discipline of the eye and the hand, far from any rapid consumption of meaning.
Repairing in Modernity: The Innovation of Urushi
Long before it gained fame through kintsugi, urushi lacquer was revered in Japan for its strength, resilience, and luminous beauty. This natural lacquer has coated everything from Buddhist statues and samurai armor to tableware, writing boxes, and temple architecture. Resistant to water, heat, and bacteria, urushi was once a symbol of durability and refinement in daily life.
Today, a new generation of artisans is rediscovering its potential as a medium for conservation, but also for ecological innovation. In addition to traditional crafts, urushi is being applied to everyday objects such as cutlery, bowls, furniture, and even contemporary items like surfboards or tech accessories. These experimental uses revive its utilitarian role while embracing a modern aesthetic sensibility. Artisans like Takuya Tsutsumi in Kyoto exemplify this evolution, balancing ancestral expertise with environmental consciousness. He describes his approach as part of a larger “lacquer ecosystem”, where every drop of resin is cultivated, preserved, and used with deep respect for nature. “Don't waste a drop”, he says, reminding us that materials carry meaning.
This movement involves a broader community of craftspeople committed to the longevity and creative reuse of natural resources. From lacquer harvesters in Iwate to restorers in Wajima, these practitioners collectively embody a philosophy where repair is an act of reinvention. Urushi, in this light, is less a relic of the past than a living material, quietly shaping more sustainable futures.
Recycle to Dream: The Future as Legacy
In recent years, a number of Japanese architects and artisans have turned toward circular design, a principle rooted in minimizing waste, reusing materials, and building for regeneration. This approach extends tradition, drawing from the country’s deep respect for materials and life cycles.
A striking large-scale example of this philosophy is the Japan Pavilion at Expo 2025 Osaka, designed by Nikken Sekkei. Constructed using cross-laminated timber sourced from sustainably managed Japanese forests and salvaged materials, the structure is designed to be fully dismantled and reused after the Expo. Its circular shape evokes the concept of wa (harmony) while also referencing the cyclical patterns of life and nature.
The building showcases how traditional values can inspire new forms of sustainable craftsmanship on a monumental scale. The timber's tactile surfaces, modular systems, and low-impact engineering echo the same ethics that guide rural carpenters, textile weavers, or lacquer artisans in their studios across Japan.
While Expo 2025 is a temporary event, the Japan Pavilion offers a lasting reflection on architecture, one that conveys stories of transmission and thoughtful renewal, and thus emerges as a powerful manifesto. It proclaims that repairing, recycling, and reusing are ways of weaving invisible continuities between generations, between territories, between humans and nature. This approach invites us to imagine a future where the greatest structures might be built with the humility of the handmade, and where repair and reuse are not limitations but creative beginnings.
Japanese artisanal practices of reuse and repair embody a resilience born not from resistance to time, but from an ability to evolve with it. Their endurance suggests an alternative to our dominant throwaway culture, one in which aging, rupture, and repair are invitations to delve deeper into the history of things.
Through these processes, a deeply rooted philosophy is revealed, where nothing is thrown away but everything is transformed. In this way of inhabiting objects, fabrics, architecture, and gestures, craftsmanship is an art of living, a way of being based on attention, patience, and respect for the material. Faced with the challenges of the present, this wisdom suggests that innovation does not always lie in disruption, but in the subtle continuity of a gesture.
Thus, repair and reuse become acts of care, creative resistance, and sustained attention, gestures that quietly affirm that even what is broken has a place, a purpose, and a story to tell.
About the Author: Sébastien is a writer and videographer living in Tokyo. Born in 1995 under the sun of Marseille in the South of France, he has been living in Japan since 2022. He has written for several international media outlets, mainly about Japan, art, and cinema. In his free time, he enjoys drinking coffee and taking 35mm photos.
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