A servant named Genmai is pouring tea for his samurai master in the fifteenth century. Rice grains fall from his sleeve into the cup. The master, enraged at the ruined tea, kills him — and then drinks it, and finds it better than before, and names the blend after the man he has just killed.

There is no Genmai. The story appears everywhere and is corroborated nowhere, and it has the shape of something reverse-engineered from a name: genmai is simply the word for the rice. The legend is an explanation invented to sit behind a compound noun.

Rice was cheap and tea was not. Rice went into tea to make the tea go further, and the drink was known for a long time as a poor household’s tea. The most grounded account of the roasted form puts it in Kyoto in the 1920s or 30s, with a merchant looking for a use for the broken pieces of kagami mochi — the New Year rice cakes, cracked open in the ceremony and then simply left over.

Nobody was killed. Somebody had a pile of broken mochi and a reluctance to throw it out.

The shogun Ashikaga Yoshimasa breaks a favourite Chinese celadon tea bowl. He sends it to China to be mended. It comes back stapled with ugly metal clamps. Disgusted by the crude repair, he commissions Japanese craftsmen to find something more beautiful — and they answer with lacquer and gold, and kintsugi is born, and with it the whole philosophy of the honoured break.

He did not ask for a repair. He asked for a replacement — an identical bowl, undamaged, the flaw gone entirely. That request is the opposite of every moral the story is used to carry.

China had no equal bowl to send. Their craftsmen made their own decision: they clamped the crack and sent the same bowl back. It was the tea masters around Yoshimasa, receiving it, who looked at the frank ugly staples and decided they had improved it. The bowl survives. It is called Bakōhan — locust clamp — because the metal sits on the glaze like a large insect. It has never had gold on it. It never will.

So the founding object of the aesthetic of the visible mend is an object whose owner wanted the damage erased, whose repair was somebody else’s shortcut, and whose beauty was conferred on it by the room after the fact.

Le Corbusier, at Marseille, rejects the smooth white surface. He chooses raw concrete deliberately, as a manifesto of material honesty — the building shows what it is made of, the plank marks left in the surface as proof of the pour. From this decision the word brutalism is taken, and a movement follows.

He described the origin himself, and the description is not a manifesto. Eighty contractors. A massacre of concrete, in his phrase. The work came out so far past salvage that no rendering could have reconciled it.

Postwar France had no steel to spare for the smooth formwork that would have produced the intended finish, so the concrete was poured against rough boards. Then it was poured badly, by too many hands. Faced with a surface that could not be corrected, he decided to leave everything raw — and afterwards wrote beautifully about crudity against finesse, about precision against accident, as though the accident had been the plan.

The English architects who coined brutalism took the word from him a year later. He is said to have disliked being filed under it.