Trevor Noah Explains How Kintsugi, the Japanese Art of Repairing Pottery, Helped Him Overcome Life’s Tragedies

Trevor Noah end­ed his stint as the host of The Dai­ly Show a lit­tle over three years ago, but he’s made him­self into anoth­er kind of pop-cul­tur­al pres­ence since then. In evi­dence, we have his appear­ance above on the pop­u­lar pod­cast and YouTube show Diary of a CEO. For more than two and a half hours, Noah dis­cuss­es with host Steven Bartlett (who, like Noah, also hap­pens to be African-born with mixed parent­age) his rea­sons for quit­ting that polit­i­cal-news-com­e­dy TV insti­tu­tion, his strug­gles with depres­sion, and the time his step­fa­ther shot his moth­er in the head. She lived, owing to the mirac­u­lous­ly unlike­ly tra­jec­to­ry of the bul­let, but that did­n’t stop the expe­ri­ence from becom­ing what Noah describes as the worst of his life.

Dis­cussing all this brings to his mind the Japan­ese art of kintsu­gi (pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture). “It’s a prac­tice of repair­ing pot­tery and ceram­ics that have bro­ken,” Noah explains. “What hap­pens is, you break a plate, or you break a vase or some­thing,” and “they put it back togeth­er, these arti­sans who do it. But they don’t just glue it back togeth­er, they glue it back togeth­er and they sort of adorn it with a gold­en bind­ing. And what you get is an object that is some­how more beau­ti­ful than before it was bro­ken.”

Kintsu­gi struck him as “one of the most beau­ti­ful con­cepts, and a dif­fer­ent way to think about being ‘fixed’ or ‘over­com­ing’ ”; it was­n’t “the idea that we are per­fect, the way we were before some­thing hap­pened to us, but rather, it is that we get to wear our cracks with a new type of pride, and a new type of beau­ty.”

Noah would hard­ly be the only per­son to see in these recon­sti­tut­ed ceram­ic ves­sels with their gleam­ing kintsu­gi seams a metaphor for him­self. Like more than a few pub­lic fig­ures in the West, he’s been will­ing to dis­cuss the vicis­si­tudes of his life in detail, and even use them for mate­r­i­al in work like his stand-up com­e­dy and his mem­oir Born a Crime. But it is unusu­al, in a chat like this with mil­lions and mil­lions of view­ers, to hear ref­er­ence made to a half-mil­len­ni­um-old Japan­ese form of pot­tery repair. That pos­si­bil­i­ty, of course, is cen­tral to the appeal of long-form inter­view pod­casts, whose con­ver­sa­tions have the time and space to go far down unex­pect­ed paths. The Dai­ly Show may deliv­er more laughs per minute, but giv­en its for­mat’s time con­straints, kintsu­gi-type talk is no doubt the first thing to get edit­ed out — and the cut cer­tain­ly won’t be high­light­ed.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Visu­al Intro­duc­tion to Kintsu­gi, the Japan­ese Art of Repair­ing Bro­ken Pot­tery and Find­ing Beau­ty in Imper­fec­tion

How Japan­ese Kintsu­gi Mas­ters Restore Pot­tery by Beau­ti­fy­ing the Cracks

David Lynch Explains Why Depres­sion Is the Ene­my of Cre­ativ­i­ty — and Why Med­i­ta­tion Is the Solu­tion

Stanford’s Robert Sapol­sky Demys­ti­fies Depres­sion, Which, Like Dia­betes, Is Root­ed in Biol­o­gy

Stephen Fry on Cop­ing with Depres­sion: It’s Rain­ing, But the Sun Will Come Out Again

Charles Bukows­ki Explains How to Beat Depres­sion: Spend 3–4 Days in Bed and You’ll Get the Juices Flow­ing Again (NSFW)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the author of the newslet­ter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Sum­ma­riz­ing Korea) and Kore­an Newtro. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.