He Showed Oysters

How To

Produce Pearls

KOKICHI Mikimoto—the man who developed the art of inducing reluctant oysters to produce pearls, built it into a major industry with world-wide connections, and himself made a fortune from it—died in Japan on September 23, aged 96.

Mikimoto set up in business in about 1905, after 15 years of experi mentation. So far no one seems to have succeded in imitating his enterprise on a commercial scale.

His pearls have been wrongly called artificial. All pearls are an unnatural development in an oyster, but, from a chemical aspect, Mikimoto’s products are in every sense natural pearls. Even the seed on which the oyster built was a pearl—not a grain of sand as has so often been stated. These seed pearls were usually imported from the United States where they are obtained from small shell fish in the Mississippi and other rivers.

A pearl’s value depends largely on its lustre —and lustre depends on the chemical constituents of the water in which it is produced.

Mikimoto’s pearls are thus, in this respect, equal to the best Japanese un-cultured pearls—but cultured

pearls, produced, say, in the Persian Gulf, an area noted for its beautiful pearls, might be superior in lustre to Mikimoto’s. The same may be true of pearls cultured at, say, Thursday Island.

The secret, or art, is in the highly skilled job of correctly placing the seed pearl in the oyster without killing the oyster.

One of the war reparations Aus tralia gained from Japan was the secret of this artificial pearl culture, but Mikimoto must have smiled as

he conducted the Aussies over his pearl farm and laboratories.

In Australia—Unsuccessful

Side-Line

It is one thing to explain the process or to put down on paper, and another to develop the skills re quired—as the Australian CSIRO has discovered at its Thursday Island experimental station during post-war years.

The CSIRO’s fishery research officer, at Sydney, said in September that no great effort had been made

at Thursday Island. The experi ments were being conducted more or less as a side-line.

In fact, there was some opposi tion to the development of culture pearls on the part of Australia. A lot of technical difficulties had been encountered, and Australia did not have one pearl to show for the effort so far put into the project.

The officer conceded that, if suc cessful, a worth-while industry might be developed by some in terested private enterprise.

Meanwhile the Australian culture pearl industry is in about the same condition as the Australian MOP industry.