Sanuki Kagari Temari are hand-sewn textile spheres made in Kagawa Prefecture. Cotton threads dyed with plants and trees — madder, indigo, sappanwood, chestnut — are wound and stitched over a core of rice husks, following a technique practiced in the region since the Edo period, when Kagawa, then known as Sanuki, was one of Japan's principal cotton-producing areas. The sphere is formed entirely by hand, without measuring instruments. The pattern is then built up using a stitching method specific to this tradition, passing thread from line to line across a surface divided into sections. Training begins with five years of faithful reproduction before any personal expression is introduced; full mastery takes more than a decade.
The craft nearly disappeared. It has been brought back by Eiko Araki, representative of the Sanuki Kagari Temari Preservation Society, who encountered temari in her thirties through a local folk craft collection and stopped engraving metal entirely at forty to pursue it. The Society currently has around 120 active makers. Araki is careful not to frame the work as a museum exercise — she wants temari to be seen as something alive, not only preserved.
