Within the Temari discussion group a question was raised by one of the members regarding being able to interpret enough from the Japanese books to be able to make it a worthwhle effort. Another member who has spent time in Japan and in Temari classes there, and who has a goodly collection of Japanese Temari books, offered this response:

Firstly you've got to study the photos and diagram very closely.  Each ball (for the most part) has a colour picture as well as a black and white one on the same page as the diagram. The ball in the black and white pic is  usually at a different angle than the colour one so you get to see a different part of the pattern.  Useful!  If the ball in question has an obvious obi with north and south poles you can count the number of divisions and take it from there.  If there are squares or hexagons on it, then it will be an 8 combination  ball.  If there are pentagons then it is a 10 combination.

On most balls the stitches build up in an outward direction so you can see the top layer of threads and from there work your way back to the centre of that bit of pattern and you can find the start point.

Remember that Japanese writing goes from back to front, top to bottom and right to left.  The pages of colour pics usually number the balls and also give you the page number for the instructions.  By looking for the corresponding black and white pic you'll find the instructions and should also find the page number referring back to the colour pic.  It is worth studying the characters a little so that you can recognize some of them like the ones for "page" for instance.  The top right  hand corner on the instruction page usually tells you whether it is an 8 or 10 combination ball or how many segments or divisions it is.  You will also find there the  circumference of the ball in cm. and the diameter as well,  though  some books I have found will only give one or the other. I would recommend that you use a similar size ball to the one you are attempting as large patterns do not fit on small balls and vice versa. They can be adapted, but that's another chapter!

If you then follow your way through the list of instructions you will find in the Cosmo books 1 to 7 (which are the main ones I use and on Ginny's page of book covers) that the numbers of the colours used are listed in brackets.  This is no help as we don't use Cosmo threads, but it does tell you how many colours are used altogether, which is not always apparent from looking at the colour pic.

You then get on to characters in bold type.  These are the important ones as they tell you, with reference to the diagram, where  and in what order to stitch.  They use Japanese characters as well as "A,B,C..." or "1,2,3..." to indicate where the stitches lie and the order .  I'm afraid that  not being able to remember what the characters are, I tend to refer to "T, Box, Fuji..." as this is what the equivalent of "ABC" looks like to me.