Foreign News: Three-minute Pearls

Meanest of tricks is to tell a wealthy woman that the best way to clean her Oriental pearls is to swish them through boiling water. As the pearls heat they will lose their moonbeam lustre, may crack and the wealthy lady will grow frantic. Yet last week all Japan honored a short, stocky, crinkly-faced old man who had rolled up his kimono sleeves, seized a blunt spade and vigorously shoveled into a fiery furnace 720,000 of his best pearls. Within three minutes they turned to flaky ashes (crystallized lime).

Gathered around the furnace were Japan’s leading pearl dealers. “Banzai!” they shouted. “May you live 10,000 years, oh Most Honorable Kokichi Mikimoto! Banzai! The price of pearls has risen!” The price had risen some 30%. the dealers agreed, all because Kokichi Mikimoto had shoveled 720,000 pearls into a furnace.

Nobody can eat or drink pearls. Unlike Brazilians who burned their coffee to raise prices, and unlike “striking” Midwest farmers who have destroyed food that did not belong to them, Mr. Mikimoto had burned up last week nothing edible or useful and nothing that was not his own. From the fiery furnace he stepped back a unique hero of the Depression. Pearls mean little to him. What he had really burned up was his lifelong dream.

Some years ago Mr. Mikimoto bought a prominent hill and dreamed of erecting on it a hollow tower which he proposed to fill with pearls as a farmer fills an elevator with grain. “My reason,” Mr. Mikimoto used to say, “is to give pleasure to women of generations yet unborn who will wear pearls from my tower—Mikimoto pearls!”

Oysters make both Oriental and Mikimoto pearls. When Mother Nature annoys an oyster by permitting a tiny bit of some irritating substance to get under its shell, the oyster reacts by covering this substance with layer on layer of pearly nacre, and the result is called an Oriental pearl. When Mr. Mikimoto annoys the oysters in his 41,000 acres of oyster beds by having a minute substance delicately inserted in the body of each oyster, the oysters react by producing about $1,000,000 worth of Mikimoto pearls a year. In gratitude Mr. Mikimoto has erected a monument to the Mikimoto oysters. Nothing so infuriates Oriental pearl men and nothing so delights Mr. Mikimoto as a decision of the French courts which he quotes from memory on all occasions thus: “Japanese culture pearls [Mikimoto]; produced by scientific stimulation of the oyster are in no sense false or imitation pearls. . . . They can be sold as real pearls without any indication of their origin.”

Actually Mikimoto branches in Paris, London and Manhattan indicate that they are selling “cultured pearls,” sell them for much less than the price of “real” Orientals.* In Japan spry Grandpa Mikimoto, 75, is the undisputed “Pearl King,” purveys Mikimoto pearls to the Imperial Court. Speaking only Japanese and proud of his eccentricities, Pearl King Mikimoto loves to fete Occidental visitors to his pearl farm. First they are given baskets of Mikimoto oysters. Next Mikimoto minions open each guest’s oysters, extract the pearls and present them to the guests, throw the oyster meat and shells away. Pearl King Mikimoto then leads the way to lunch which begins with fried oysters in which the guests find badly discolored pearls.

“Why does Mr. Mikimoto always wear a derby hat and a Japanese kimono?” one of the Pearl King’s secretaries was asked.

“A derby hat,” replied the quick-witted secretary, “is supposed to suggest in Japan that the wearer has achieved special rank by his own achievements, when the derby hat is worn with a kimono.”

*In Manhattan’s smart Saks Fifth Avenue a 17-in. string of small but perfectly matched cultured pearls was priced at $70 last week. A mammoth string of 71 cultured pearls was priced at $17,500.