Dedicated Artists Are Keeping Japan’s Ancient Craft of Temari Alive 

Sanuki Kagari Temari balls are in a gift box in Eiko Araki's studio in Kawaramachi, Kagawa prefecture, Japan, on Sept. 5, 2024. (AP Photo/Yuri Kageyama) 
Sanuki Kagari Temari balls are in a gift box in Eiko Araki's studio in Kawaramachi, Kagawa prefecture, Japan, on Sept. 5, 2024. (AP Photo/Yuri Kageyama) 
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Dedicated Artists Are Keeping Japan’s Ancient Craft of Temari Alive 

Sanuki Kagari Temari balls are in a gift box in Eiko Araki's studio in Kawaramachi, Kagawa prefecture, Japan, on Sept. 5, 2024. (AP Photo/Yuri Kageyama) 
Sanuki Kagari Temari balls are in a gift box in Eiko Araki's studio in Kawaramachi, Kagawa prefecture, Japan, on Sept. 5, 2024. (AP Photo/Yuri Kageyama) 

Time seems to stop here.

Women sit in a small circle, quietly, painstakingly stitching patterns on balls the size of an orange, a stitch at a time.

At the center of the circle is Eiko Araki, a master of the Sanuki Kagari Temari, a Japanese traditional craft passed down for more than 1,000 years on the southwestern island of Shikoku.

Each ball, or "temari," is a work of art, with colorful geometric patterns carrying poetic names like "firefly flowers" and "layered stars." A temari ball takes weeks or months to finish. Some cost hundreds of dollars (tens of thousands of yen), although others are much cheaper.

These kaleidoscopic balls aren’t for throwing or kicking around. They’re destined to be heirlooms, carrying prayers for health and goodness. They might be treasured like a painting or piece of sculpture in a Western home.

The concept behind temari is an elegant otherworldliness, an impractical beauty that is also very labor-intensive to create.

"Out of nothing, something this beautiful is born, bringing joy," says Araki. "I want it to be remembered there are beautiful things in this world that can only be made by hand."

The region where temari originated was good for growing cotton, warm with little rainfall, and the spherical creations continue to be made out of the humble material.

At Araki's studio, which also serves as head office for temari's preservation society, there are 140 hues of cotton thread, including delicate pinks and blues, as well as more vivid colors and all the subtle gradations in between.

The women dye them by hand, using plants, flowers and other natural ingredients, including cochineal, a bug living in cacti that produces a red dye. The deeper shade of indigo is dyed again and again to turn just about black. Yellow and blue are combined to form gorgeous greens. Soy juice is added to deepen the tints, a dash of organic protein.

Outside the studio, loops of cotton thread, in various tones of yellow today, hang outside in the shade to dry.

The arduous process starts with making the basic ball mold on which the stitching is done. Rice husks that are cooked and then dried are placed in a piece of cotton, then wound with thread, over and over, until, almost magically, a ball appears in your hands.

Then the stitching begins.

The balls are surprisingly hard, so each stitch requires a concentrated, almost painful, push. The motifs must be precise and even.

Each ball has lines to guide the stitching — one that goes around it like the equator, and others that zigzag to the top and bottom.

These days, temari is getting some new recognition, among Japanese and foreigners as well. Caroline Kennedy took lessons in the ball-making when she was United States ambassador to Japan a decade ago.

Yoshie Nakamura, who promotes Japanese handcrafted art in her duty-free shop at Tokyo's Haneda airport, says she features temari there because of its intricate and delicate designs.

"Temari that might have been everyday in a faraway era is now being used for interior decoration," she said.

"I really feel each Sanuki Kagari Temari speaks of a special, one-and-only existence in the world."

Araki has come up with some newer designs that feel both modern and historical. She is trying to make the balls more accessible to everyday life — for instance, as Christmas tree ornaments. A strap with a dangling miniature ball, though quite hard to make because of its size, is affordable at about 1,500 yen ($10) each.

Another of Araki's inventions is a cluster of pastel balls that opens and shuts with tiny magnets. Fill it with sweet-smelling herbs for a kind of aromatic diffuser.

Araki, a graceful woman who talks very slowly, her head cocked to one side as though always in thought, often travels to Tokyo to teach. But mostly she works and gives lessons in her studio, an abandoned kindergarten with faded blue paint and big windows with tired wooden frames.

She started out as a metalwork artist. Her husband's parents were temari masters who worked hard to resurrect the artform when it was declining in the modern age, at risk of dying out.

They were stoic people, rarely bestowing praise and instead always scolding her, she remembers. It’s a tough-love approach that’s common in the handing down of many Japanese traditional arts, from Kabuki acting to hogaku music, that demand lifetimes of selfless devotion.

Today, only several dozen people, all women, can make the temari balls to traditional standards.

"The most challenging aspect is nurturing successors. It typically takes over 10 years to train them, so you need people who are willing to continue the craft for a very long time," Araki said.

"When people start to feel joy along with the hardship that comes with making temari, they tend to keep going."



Han Kang Wins Nobel Prize for Literature

10 October 2024, Berlin: A customer in the bookstore Dussmann das Kulturkaufhaus holds a book by 2024 Nobel Prize winner Han Kang from South Korea. Photo: Sebastian Gollnow/dpa
10 October 2024, Berlin: A customer in the bookstore Dussmann das Kulturkaufhaus holds a book by 2024 Nobel Prize winner Han Kang from South Korea. Photo: Sebastian Gollnow/dpa
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Han Kang Wins Nobel Prize for Literature

10 October 2024, Berlin: A customer in the bookstore Dussmann das Kulturkaufhaus holds a book by 2024 Nobel Prize winner Han Kang from South Korea. Photo: Sebastian Gollnow/dpa
10 October 2024, Berlin: A customer in the bookstore Dussmann das Kulturkaufhaus holds a book by 2024 Nobel Prize winner Han Kang from South Korea. Photo: Sebastian Gollnow/dpa

South Korean poet and novelist Han Kang was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature Thursday for a poetic and unsettling body of work that the Nobel committee said “confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life.”
A slow-burning international literary star who has won multiple awards in South Korea and Europe, Han is the first Asian woman and the first South Korean writer to win the Nobel literature prize. She was awarded for books, including “The Vegetarian” and “Human Acts," that explore the pain of being human and the scars of Korea's turbulent history.
Nobel literature committee member Anna-Karin Palm said Han writes about “trauma, pain and loss,” whether individual or collective, “with the same compassion and care.”
“And this, I think, is something that is quite remarkable,” The Associated Press quoted Palm as saying.
Nobel committee chairman Anders Olsson praised Han’s “empathy for the vulnerable, often female lives” of her characters.
“She has a unique awareness of the connections between body and soul, the living and the dead,” Olsson said.
Han is the second South Korean national to win a Nobel Prize. Late former President Kim Dae-jung won the peace prize in 2000 for his efforts to restore democracy in South Korea during the country’s previous military rule and improve relations with war-divided rival North Korea.
Mats Malm, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy that awards the prize, said he spoke to the author and surprised her with the news.
“She was having an ordinary day, it seems, had just finished supper with her son,” he said. “She wasn’t really prepared for this.”
Han wins the Nobel at a time of growing global influence of South Korean culture, which in recent years has included the success of films like director Bong Joon-ho’s Oscar-winning “ Parasite,” the Netflix survival drama “Squid Game” and the worldwide fame of K-pop groups like BTS and BLACKPINK.
Han, 53, won the International Booker Prize for fiction translated into English in 2016 for “The Vegetarian,” an unsettling novel in which a woman’s decision to stop eating meat has devastating consequences.
Accepting that award, Han said writing novels “is a way of questioning for me.”
“I just try to complete my questions through the process of my writing and I try to stay in the questions, sometimes painful, sometimes — well — sometimes demanding,” she said.
With “The Vegetarian,” she said, ”I wanted to question about being human and I wanted to describe a woman who desperately didn’t want to belong to the human race any longer."
Han made her publishing debut as a poet in 1993; her first short story collection was published in 1995 and her first novel, “Black Deer,” in 1998.
Works translated into English include “Greek Lessons” — about the relationship between a woman who can no longer speak and a teacher who is losing his sight — “Human Acts” and “The White Book,” a poetic novel that draws on the death of Han’s older sister shortly after birth. “The White Book” was an International Booker Prize finalist in 2018.
“Human Acts” — which Olsson, the Nobel committee chair, called a work of “witness literature” — is based on the real-life killing of pro-democracy protesters in Han’s home city of Gwangju in 1980. The book won Italy’s Malaparte Prize in 2017.
Her most recent novel, “We Do Not Part,” is due to be published in English next year. It also confronts a chapter in South Korea's 20th-century history, which saw the country endure war, the division of the Korean peninsula and dictatorship. The novel deals with a 1948-1949 uprising on Jeju, an island south of the Korean mainland in which thousands of people were killed.
Anders Karlsson, a lecturer at London's School of Oriental and African Studies who has translated Han into Swedish, said he was “overjoyed” at the Nobel accolade.
He said Han's “poignant, condensed” prose is able to describe “difficult and dark passages in South Korean history ... in quite open and inviting language that engages and does not deter the reader.”
The literature prize has long faced criticism that it is too focused on European and North American writers of style-heavy, story-light prose. It has also been male-dominated — Han is only the 18th woman among its 120 laureates.