Word: mikimoto
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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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...