Late fifteenth century, Muromachi period: legend holds that Shogun Ashikaga Yoshimasa sent a cracked Chinese tea bowl back to China and received it mended with ugly metal staples, prompting Japanese craftsmen to repair with lacquer and gold dust instead. By the early 1600s the technique was common enough that a warrior bought, deliberately broke, and repaired tea bowls for profit, per curator Louise Cort. The practice braided into wabi-sabi aesthetics, mottainai, regret at waste, and mushin, acceptance of change.
The story tea people tell: a host showed Sen no Rikyu a prized antique jar; Rikyu ignored it; the host smashed it in anger; friends kintsugi-mended the pieces; on the next visit Rikyu smiled, now it is magnificent. Whether or not it happened, the anecdote is the doctrine: perfection is uninteresting; survival has texture. The crack is the resume.
The claim: kintsugi monetizes damage, and its modern therapy-industry afterlife, your scars make you beautiful, converts the honest craft into a mandate: be grateful for the breaking, which quietly exculpates the breakers. Verdict: the craft itself makes no such demand, it gilds cracks; it does not schedule them. But the merchandising drift is real. The bowl did not need to be dropped. It only needed, once dropped, to be worth more than silence about it.
When did the damage become the most valuable part of the object?