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Japan's Pearl Museum
by Dea Adria Mallin
“I would like to adorn the necks of all the women in the world with pearls”
Kokichi Mikimoto
Archaeologists report that divers risked their lives as early as 2250 B.C. to find the perfect natural pearl. Pearls have filled ancient Egyptian vaults and modern safe-deposit boxes. In the 12th century, the Chinese created blister pearls by inserting tiny lead images of Buddha to make flat hollow pearls. In the late 1800’s, Kikicho Mikimoto spent twelve years of his life and all his money to culture the pearl and ensure a spherical shape. Books are titled “The Secret Pearl” and “The Mystery of the Golden Pearls.” Famous cowboys carried pearl-handled pistols. The Bible is filled with quotes citing pearls. Chicago’s Field Museum mounted an elaborate exhibition on pearls in 2002, and the Smithsonian Institution mounted “The Allure of Pearls” in 2005. And eco-tourism vendors in Bahrain now teach tourists how to pearl dive.
If the first pearls were the accidental finds of fishermen, today, pearls are a multibillion dollar industry, and while brides still prefer the perfect delicate strand of heirloom pearls that fit right into the hollow of the neck, there is a concomitant trendy rage for that strand of $17,000 South Sea pearls.
Always, there is mystery, there is radiance, there is luster around the pearl. There is also a pearl museum. In Toba, Japan, across a short, covered pedestrian bridge connected to the mainland, there is Mikimoto Pearl Island where tourists can pay an admission fee and visit the Pearl Museum and Kokichi Mikimoto Memorial Hall, built in 1993 to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Mikimoto’s accomplishments.
Kokichi Mikimoto
Mikimoto (1858-1954) was not actually the first to culture a pearl, but he was the first to successfully induce the growth of a fully spherical pearl, and he built a masterful empire around it. The son of a noodle salesman, he had a fascination with the cultivation of pearls at a time when Japan had become involved in foreign trade. The natural pearls recovered by divers were so highly coveted in the international market that the beds were being overharvested.
Mikimoto, like most Japanese, loved the pearl and wanted to save it by cultivating it in farmed beds. He studied intensively, experimented, and threw all his resources into the venture. After four years, he obtained Patent No. 2670, for cultured pearls grown on what is now Mikimoto Pearl Island, from a “bead” planted inside the shell of the oyster as an irritant onto which the mollusk deposited its nacre.
Mikimoto, however, wanted more than the semi-circular pearl he first cultivated, and for decades, continued to seed oysters, research them, and experiment despite red tides and unexpectedly low water temperatures. While he was able to produce blister pearls by 1893, two other Japanese inventors already had the patent, and finally, in 1905, Mikimoto succeeded in culturing the spherical pearl. Opening a site in Okinawa, he cultured black-lipped pearl oysters, and despite typhoons and other natural setbacks, cultured a 10- millimeter spherical pearl in 1931.
By then, his Mikimoto Pearl Stores had a long history in Tokyo, London, Paris, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Shanghai, and Bombay. The entrepreneurial Kokichi Mikimoto not only mastered pearls and gold, but marketing and public relations. He began with a five-story pearl pagoda at a world exposition in Philadelphia in 1926 and went onto to create pearl replicas of famous buildings and historic objects in world fairs and expositions in Chicago, New York, and Paris.
Because there were, in the 1930’s, many imitators selling inferior cultured pearls, in a brilliant piece of publicity, Mikimoto built a blazing bonfire in the plaza in front of the Kobe Chamber of Commerce and threw in an endless succession of inferior cultured pearls. Bringing the world’s attention to the importance of maintaining high quality, he also founded the Japan Pearl Producers Association. Mikimoto lived for almost 100 years, and his legend lives after him, not only in the Mikimoto stores and with high end jewelers, but in the reputation he built for pearls of distinction.
The Pearl Museum
The Memorial Hall contains Mikimoto’s earliest jewelry, some of which has been bought back by Mikimoto & Co. Ltd. at auctions. The Pearl Pagoda, with 12,760 Mikimoto pearls, took 750 artisans six months to complete and was exhibited at Philadelphia’s Sesquicentennial International Exposition in 1926. There is also a pearl Liberty Bell, one third the size of the original Liberty Bell, with 12,250 pearls, which was displayed at the New York World’s Fair in 1939. On a simpler level, there is a brooch, made for the 1937 Paris International Exhibition, which can be worn in many different ways using various clasps.
Also in Memorial Hall is the “Boss’s String of Pearls,” or Taisho-ren. Mikimoto was affectionately called “Big Boss” by his workers, and they had observed him putting this necklace together over a period of ten years. It has 49 graduated pearls, and the center pearl is an astounding 14 millimeters in diameter.
Enter the Pearl Museum and learn through live demonstrations and videos everything you ever wanted to know about how pearls are made, harvested, sorted, selected, and strung. There are also exhibits explaining pricing, according to such key factors as luster, nacre thickness, blemishing, size, weight, roundness, and something called “orient,” or the play of colors across the pearl surface.
There is another exhibit that examines the relationship between people and pearls across the centuries. And there is the Pearl Pavilion, with a pearl that is 1.6 inches in diameter. Remember that a bride typically wears a strand of pearls 6 or 7 millimeters in diameter. Also in the jewelry museum is a Roman necklace from the 1st century, a 4th century Byzantine gold necklace with pink pearls, ancient Persian pearls with a diver’s nose clip, and a carpet from made from pearls.
On the site, visitors can watch the traditionally white-clad women divers, called ama, as they demonstrate how to dive for oysters. Through the ages, the women of the Shima Peninsula went diving in search of such edibles as abalone and seaweed, and much later, as part of the pearl industry, to collect oysters and return them to the seabed following the insertion of the “bead.” Once upon a time, there were thousands of ama. Once.
At the museum, visitors can also read a 1927 letter from Thomas Edison to Kokichi Mikimoto, written after they visited together at Edison’s West Orange, New Jersey home. “Dear Kokichi,” wrote Edison, thanking him for the visit and congratulating him on an award from the Japanese government. The two inventors were mutual admirers, and in their meeting, Edison said that “it is one of the wonders of the world that you were able to culture pearls.” Kokichi humbly responded, “If you were the moon of the world of inventors, I would simply be one of the many tiny stars.”
A pearl can be explained as mostly aragonite crystals (a form of calcium carbonate, or CaCO3, which also makes up other marine organisms from coral to sea urchins) that are produced by a variety of mollusks such as mussels, oysters, clams, snails, conch, and abalone, from warm fresh and salt waters around the world. Natural pearls occur when an irritant accidentally gets inside the shell, and the mollusk protects its delicate interior by coating the foreign object, creating an organic shape in the pearl. Cultured pearls occur when humans intervene, inserting a “bead” and controlling the size and shape of the resultant pearl.
Scientifically, we understand the pearl, and the Mikimoto Pearl Island Hall and Museum define and clarify for us. But on some other level, we neither understand, nor do we want to understand. We merely grasp instinctively that we must not throw pearls before swine, and on a higher level, we bedeck the bride, in all her radiance and purity, with pearls --ever mystical, ever luminous, ever timeless.