11/04/2026
🌸Today we received the very last of the 2026 harvest. I’m calling them the “late bloomers”.
💭 Fuji suggested we make an “unboxing video” .. despite his overwhelming enthusiasm , this IS his happiest time of the year, it’s also not his first rodeo!
❤️Photo on the wall is Fuji’s father with Kokichi Mikimoto during the insatiable Japan Akoya pearl years. As decades passed the products the family business focused on changed some, but the dedication to learn / educate did not! Below is an excerpt from Fuji’s teaching about the origins of fresh water pearl farming in Japan.
🧐“Flattered by numerous counterfeits, Japan origin freshwater pearls (Lakes Biwa and Kasumi-ga-Ura are the most significant) had their heyday between the late 1950’s & 70’s. Largely unknown to the Western World (who were taught that pearls ought to be spherical, like bead nucleated Akoya ocean pearls) they were bought mostly by Indians for sale to the Middle East (because non-nucleated natural pearls were more familiar to them, they rejected the former).
Production of Japan Biwa and Japan Kasumi pearls dwindled to a vestige in the 1980’s, just as China,
where non-nucleated freshwater pearls had been cultivated in much greater quantities since 1970. Freshwater bead nucleation technology, which could produce larger pearls than Akoya and was practiced in Japan starting in the 1960’s, was introduced to China somewhat secretly in the 1980’s by Japanese technicians made jobless by the demise of the traditional Hyriopsis schlegeli
mussels used for cultivation.
For some 40 years, minuscule Japanese cultivation existed because Kiyoshi Yoneguchi, a second generation freshwater pearl farmer, discovered a hardier hybrid that could live with current levels of pollution. The mussels were distributed to all other freshwater pearls cultivators still trying to operate, and by their association to Chinese counterparts. But Japan by the mid-1990’s only 3 men (without help) were active, all in the Kasumi-ga-Ura area, albeit in river mouths, as the brackish lake itself was too polluted to support even the hybrid mussels. By 1985, Yoneguchi had
