FOREIGN TRADE: Pearls for Everyone

In a modest, unpainted four-room house atop a narrow headland overlooking Japan’s Ago Bay, a wizened little man in a brown kimono and a black derby hat shuffled about in a pearly haze. He was Kokichi Mikimoto, who has annoyed more oysters for more profit than any other man. Last week the longtime king of Japan’s culture-pearl industry declared the largest personal income in Japan in the first year of American occupation. He had netted three million yen ($200,000) selling pearls to the conquerors.

To Mikimoto this was a significant milestone in his postwar rehabilitation. At 89 he still makes every major decision of his company, directs every minor operation. He still likes to amuse employes by lying on his back, twirling an open umbrella with his bare feet, says: “It helps keep my workers contented.” He also likes to invite visitors to dinner, serve oysters on the half shell complete with pearls.

Annoy an Oyster. Back in 1890 Mikimoto heard a Japanese zoologist lecture on the possibility of cultivating pearls. Why not implant an irritant like a grain of sand in a baby oyster, see if the oyster would coat it with layers of nacre, and thus form a pearl? Mikimoto decided to try it.

He sold out his Tokyo mother-of-pearl business, moved to oyster-packed Ago Bay to experiment. In four years he had his first but imperfect pearl. In 19 years he had so perfected his process that few amateurs could distinguish cultured pearls from natural ones.

He expanded to twelve cultivating beds, planted three million three-year-old annoyed oysters a year, got usable pearls from about 5% when they were 7-9 years old. In the depression he shoveled as high as 720,000 cultured pearls into furnaces to keep prices up. By 1939 the U.S. alone was buying about 3,000,000 yen worth ($750,000) a year, half of them Mikimoto’s.

The war brought disaster to Mikimoto. B-29s leveled his big Tokyo retail store, strafed his Ago Bay factory. But he still had half a million oysters in the bay, a fortune in pearls in boot boxes around his home. He set up a pill factory next to his idle plant, began grinding low-grade pearls and oyster shells into powder for an elixir (Mikimoto Pearlcalc) to give energy and long life, sold it to the Japanese Navy.

Please a G.I. The American occupation was no ill wind to Mikimoto. He began selling pearls from his hoard to G.I.s. When black-market prices soared to 30,000 yen ($2,000) for a string, U.S. authorities stepped in, ordered Mikimoto and other Japanese pearlers to sell only to the U.S. Army for sale in post exchanges. Prices now vary from 300 to 2,000 yen a string ($20 to $133).

Mikimoto has already sold half his stock. But necklaces sold for 8,000 yen in Tokyo have fetched 15 times that in New York, so he is saving his best strings for the time when Japan can ship abroad.

In Ago Bay, his diving girls are again bringing up oysters. His 1,500 factory workers are deftly seeding them with a mother-of-pearl bead. Soon he expects to have 1,500,000 oysters working for him. By mass production he hopes within a few years to have prices down to suit the pockets of the masses. His eyes are on his No.1 market, the U.S. Says he: I like Americans best. They are straight-forward—like children.”