We don’t know what brave soul was the first to pry open an oyster and eat it, let alone who was the first person to bite down on a wild pearl. We do know that it didn’t take long for humans to add oysters to their food list and the occasional Rice Krispie-like pearl to their stable of adornments.
Years later the Chinese began deliberately inducing oysters to produce pearls by introducing an irritant that the bivalves would try to quarantine by surrounding it with a layer of nacre, a milky smooth, luminescent material.
But even the inventive Chinese could not figure out a way to modify the shape of their manufactured pearls. The vast majority of them continued to emerge from oysters as indented, elongated, irregularly shaped masses of nacre. The very occasional round pearl was a source of awe and wonder, not to mention tremendous profit. Such round gems soon became the Holy Grails of pearl production.
So it was up to the Japanese, a nation that long ago mastered the art of seeing possibilities where other nations don’t, to master a process for ensuring the steady production of round pearls. They did it in the early 1900s by introducing seed material whose shape and substance guaranteed that the oyster would lay down consistently thick and uniform layers of nacre. Thus was born the great Akoya (“seawater”) line of cultured pearls, a product that moved the opportunity for pearl ownership from the very rich to the middle class. Japan’s rich estuaries, especially on the southern island of Shikoku, rapidly became the seedbeds of a world-renowned industry.
Though Akoya pearls occupied a narrow color palette, ranging from bright snow whites to slightly off-whites tinged with pink, their affordability and availability soon made them the stereotype most people thought of when considering buying pearls.
Japan’s dominance of the cultured pearl market changed after World War II as a powerful combination of pollution and foreign competition challenged the reign of the Akoya. The country's rapid post-war industrialization poisoned many of the marine estuaries where Akoya farms were located, and Indonesia, Burma, the Philippines and Australia introduced larger, cheaper, more colorful varieties of cultured pearls.
Despite those setbacks, the Akoya still retains its mystique as the top-end of cultured pearls.
Lake Biwa’s Bounty
If the Japanese were able to solve the age-old problem of producing the perfect round pearl, they were just as happy to see the commercial virtues of pearls that were the polar opposites of the Akoya. Long before pearl production turned to seaside farms, people had been harvesting riverine and freshwater lake pearls. (The _self center for freshwater pearl production was Lake Biwa, near Kyoto.) These gems were descendants of the Primordial Pearl, that lumpy mass of nacre that had flummoxed the first oyster eaters. Despite their unruly look – indented like an asteroid and bulging here and there, these freshwater pearls had two great virtues: They were nacreous through and through, as opposed to the Akoya’s layer of nacre over seed; and their irregular shapes held a certain wild charm that countered the sleek look of cultured rounds.
It was this second virtue that the Japanese took advantage of as the social and cultural revolutions of the 1960s swept through the global market. They began taking a two-fisted approach to pearl sales, pushing their perfectly round, classic saltwater Akoyas with one hand, and their asymmetrical, wild, freshwater Lake Biwa beauties with the other. It was a marketer’s dream.
Alas, Lake Biwa, too, became a victim of Japan’s industrial success as the effects of pollution cut into production. Also, ironically, the story came full circle as China, the first nation to manufacture pearls, began in the 1990s to create a freshwater pearl industry that is now the dominant one on the planet.
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