What Is Wabi-Sabi? Meaning, Kanji, and How to Bring It Home

Wabi-sabi (侘び寂び, pronounced wah-bee sah-bee) is the Japanese sense that things become beautiful through age, wear and time. A stone covered in moss, a tool worn smooth by one pair of hands, a cracked bowl that has been mended: these are wabi-sabi.

I'm Ryushi Nagata. I was born in Tokyo and I run the MA walls, where one of our collections is named after this idea. Outside Japan, wabi-sabi is often explained as "the beauty of imperfection." That is part of it. But when I think about where I feel it, the thing they all share is time. This guide explains what the word means, how people in Japan feel it, and how to bring it into a home.

What does wabi-sabi mean?

Wabi-sabi joins two words that were once used separately.

Both words began with sad meanings. Wabi described the loneliness of living simply, far from town. Sabi described things that had grown old and faded. Over centuries, poets and tea masters turned them around, and started to see that loneliness and age have a beauty of their own.

The idea took its lasting shape in the tea ceremony. In the 16th century the tea master Sen no Rikyū favoured small, plain rooms and rough, hand-made bowls over polished, expensive ones. That taste is still what most Japanese people have in mind when they hear the word.

How do Japanese people feel wabi-sabi?

When I hear the word, the first places that come to mind are Kyoto and Kamakura. Kamakura is close to where I live now. Both towns are full of buildings that have stood for centuries and have been looked after the whole time. Standing in front of one, you start to think about the people who were there before you, and you feel a kind of awe for anything that has lasted so long.

That is the feeling. Japanese people sense wabi-sabi in:

• old buildings and antiques
• landscapes that only a very long time could make
• mossy places where nobody has walked for years

What these have in common is that none of them can be made quickly. Inside them you can feel a very long stretch of time.

What wabi-sabi is not

The way the word is used outside Japan sometimes feels a little off to me. It varies from person to person, so it is hard to generalise, but I often think the idea has not quite come across. I suspect it is because wabi-sabi grew out of a particular background in Japan, and without that background it is hard to picture.

So here is the simplest test I know. Wabi-sabi needs time. A new table that has been scratched at the factory to look old is not wabi-sabi. A table your family has eaten at for thirty years is.

Too much intervention also loses it. If you restore something until it looks new, the time that was in it is gone.

Wabi-sabi is not something you can buy finished. It is what happens to a thing when someone looks after it for a long time.

My grandfather's tools

The first time I remember finding something old and worn beautiful, it was my grandfather's tools. He was a carpenter in Nagasaki. When he was an apprentice, his master passed some of his own tools on to him, and my grandfather used them with great care for the rest of his working life. He sharpened the blades himself and repaired whatever broke, so that they would last.

What struck me was not only how well he treated the objects. It was that he meant to carry on what he had been given, and to keep hold of how he felt when he received it.

He was good with his hands in everything. He went on mending things and using them. If something was missing, he made it. If something was no longer needed, he rebuilt it into something else. Being around him, I met wabi-sabi many times before I knew the word.

The things I keep

I am the same now. If I am attached to something and it breaks, I would rather repair it than buy a new one. It may not work quite as well afterwards, but the memories in it matter more to me. I have not tried kintsugi yet, the craft of mending pottery with lacquer and gold, but I have already chosen where I want to learn it.

I like things you raise, more than things that arrive finished. Leather is one: you care for it, and it changes over the years. I camp a lot, and my peg hammer is made by Snow Peak, a Japanese camping brand. When the head wears down you replace only the head and keep using the hammer.

At home I grow moss in terrariums that I make myself. And every spring we put out the Boys' Day dolls that my grandparents bought for me when I was a child. They were passed to me by my parents, and now I display them for my own children. Each time I set them out, I think about handing them on again.

How to bring wabi-sabi into your home

It is hard to feel wabi-sabi in everyday life if you keep buying new things and throwing the old ones out. It comes from keeping things and passing them on. These five habits help.

1. Repair before you replace

When something you care about breaks, mend it and keep it in use. A visible repair is part of its story.

2. Choose materials that age well

Solid wood, leather, linen, unglazed clay, stone, brass. They look better after ten years than they do on the first day.

3. Give one inherited thing a proper place

A bowl from a grandparent, an old tool, a worn book. Put it where you see it, with space around it.

4. Let something grow slowly

Moss, a bonsai, a houseplant you have had for years. Living things are the easiest way to bring time into a room.

5. Do not over-restore

Clean and look after old things, but leave the marks of use. Skip new furniture that has been made to look old.

Choosing wabi-sabi wall art

A picture cannot be old on the day you hang it. What it can do is point at the things that are: stone, moss, clay, paper, a mended crack. Our Wabi-Sabi collection has six pieces, each built around one of them.

Worn Stone is a river stone shaped by water over years. Paper Grain looks closely at the fibres in handmade washi paper. Clay Form is an uneven, hand-made vessel. Kintsugi Lines follows gold seams through a dark surface. Paper Lantern is a single small light. Moss and Time is moss on weathered stone.

If I had to choose the one closest to the word, it is Moss and Time. Of everything we have made, it is the piece that reflects my own taste most strongly. I love nature and green things, and moss most of all. It only grows over a long time, and it has the freshness of something alive. When I see moss on a stone I feel that long time, and I start to imagine the story behind it.

These pieces are meant to settle you. I would hang them in a bedroom or a study, somewhere you go to be quiet.