Word: mikimoto
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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...
Pearl Maker. At the Sesquicentennial Exposition there is a $350,000 "pearl pagoda," put up to advertise the artificially cultivated pearls of Kokichi Mikimoto, 68, multimillionaire. He employs hundreds of men to insert a tiny particle of foreign matter within the shells of individual pearl oysters. Such a foreign body irritates the oyster to cover the particle with pearl material, a process that somewhat resembles the formation of a felon around a sliver in a finger. Kokichi Mikimoto employs 500 Japanese girls and many a man to go diving for the pearl oysters, hazardous occupation. Last week he debarked...