Word: mikimoto
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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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...
...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...
...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...
...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...