Mikimoto
Tiffany of Japan
Often hailed as the 'Tiffany & Co. of Japan,' Mikimoto offers luxury cultured pearls and fine jewelry, with its iconic flagship store located at the fashionable Ginza 4-Chome intersection in Tokyo. If you didn’t know (as I didn’t), Mikimoto pearls are one of the highly treasured (and priced!) pearls in the world. I’ll come back to this later…
Mikimoto’s humble beginning traces back to the Ise region of Mie Prefecture. Ise (伊勢) is located approximately 100 km (65 miles) east of Nara, Japan’s oldest capital in the eighth century. It is not necessarily an easy place to get to, but it is one of the most famous pilgrimage destinations, even to this day. This comes from the ancient belief that the area is the birthplace of Japan’s Sun Goddess, Amaterasu Ohmikami, who is enshrined at Ise Jingu (神宮 - literally, “god’s palace”).
Additionally, what makes this area unique is the living legacy of the ama (海女) – legendary 'sea women' of Toba/Shima along the coastline of this region. Their skin-diving tradition for abalone and seaweed is still alive, even after two thousand+ years. The ama played a critical role in harvesting Akoya oysters used in the cultivation of pearls when the process was first invented in the late 1800s.
The Ama, the Female Divers
Archaeological remains from 3,000 years ago show that they have been harvesting abalones, turban shells and seaweed in large quantities for millennia. The ama have played a sacred role that continues to this day – diving and dedicating their best harvest to the deity of Ise Shrine, as well as feeding the surrounding villages.
The fishing industry supported almost entirely by the ama is fairly rare, and it is only found in Korea and Japan today. The ama do not wear diving gear. They dive for up to 50 seconds at a time - just long enough to collect sea creatures - before needing air. This approach naturally limits their harvest to protect the marine ecosystem. More is not necessarily better.
Today, this eco-friendly diving technique is recognized for its “sustainable” way of living. In 2017, it was even designated as an “Important Intangible Folk Cultural Property (重要無形民俗文化財)” by the Japanese government. But more importantly, I believe it reflects a deep-seated wisdom developed over time by people who view the ocean’s bounty with profound respect and awe.
A Pearl is Born
Amongst the harvests the ama collected, they encountered wild pearls inside oyster shells, but only rarely. Natural pearls develop entirely by chance in the wild, and its supplies are completely unpredictable. In the late 1800s, fearing the extinction of Akoya oysters due to overfishing, Mikimoto’s founder, Kokichi Mikimoto (御木本幸吉：1858-1954) successfully created the world's first cultured pearls in 1893 – thus inventing the process which was thought to be impossible.
A pearl is cultivated by artificially implanting a tiny sphere (usually made up from a shell), inside a living Akoya oyster. The oyster then perceives this as a foreign object, and tries to protect itself – by secreting the same substance that makes up the inside of its shell and enveloping this “foreign object”. Over a period of one to two years, the coating gradually grows thicker, and a beautiful pearl is born! This process is so fascinating to learn, and if you want to go down that rabbit hole as I did, here’s a great link. The ingenuity of the human mind!!
Mikimoto would later be internationally hailed by a fellow inventor, Thomas Edison, during his U.S. tour in the early 1900s. Edison apparently declared with awe, “This isn't a cultured pearl, it's a real pearl. There are two things which couldn't be made at my laboratory - diamonds and pearls. It is one of the wonders of the world that you were able to culture pearls. It is something which is supposed to be biologically impossible.”
So, why am I talking about pearls ad nauseum?? Because they played an important role in changing the trajectory of one of our girls’ lives in such a profound way…
Homeschooling Projects
Sammi as Alice in “Alice in Wonderland”
We homeschooled our daughters for 15 years. Since I was a stay-at-home mom by the time we decided to start that “adventure” in homeschooling, it was mainly my job to homeschool them. But Scott liked to stay involved in the teaching because he worked from home.
One of the fun projects he tasked our girls to do was to read biographies, and find someone they admired (who was still living) to write letters to. Sammi was all about musical theater, so she wrote to people like Dick Van Dyke and Julie Andrews. It was a fun project because she would usually receive something back from them like their photo with an autograph.
Audrey, on the other hand, was only interested in one thing and one person only: ballet and Lauren Cuthbertson of The Royal Ballet in London. So she started writing – yes, the snail mails. She was very chatty and told her all about her own dancing life as only an 11 or 12-year old would.
Alice in Wonderland
Running into Christopher Wheeldon in San Francisco
Lauren Cuthbertson was a star principal dancer Audrey adored (and does to this day). She had worked closely with our favorite choreographer, Christopher Wheeldon (whom in 2013 we literally ran into by the popcorn stand in a boutique theater in San Francisco!), creating the iconic role of Alice in his innovative ballet, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in 2011 for The Royal Ballet. Audrey would play the DVD over and over again turning the living room into a stage – complete with a miniature door cut out of cardboard as a prop and dressed in my home-sewn costume.
Audrey carried on writing to her every month for about a year and a half, even though she never heard anything back. Until one day. She received a postcard from Ms. Cuthbertson’s personal assistant, Jane. Needless to say Audrey was ecstatic!
Then, our house was burglarized while we were away on a vacation…!
Without going into detail, I’ll just share what they stole from the house: No electronics, but Scott’s bass guitar. Anything gold in color. And my Mikimoto pearls – yes, I owned some.
My Own Mikimoto Pearls
When I was 13, my father was assigned to his company’s office in Hong Kong. Our whole family moved from a nice and quiet suburb of Tokyo to stinky, noisy, and chaotic Hong Kong (before it got chic & expensive).
Hong Kong was a duty-free port, and many Japanese companies opened subsidiaries there in the 70s and 80s. This is when people used to go to Hong Kong, buy cheap suitcases, and stuff them full of designer knock-offs from jeans, shoes & handbags to all kinds of electronics (remember Sony’s Walkman??) to bring back home (to sell??). In short, Hong Kong was a wild-wild west of Asia back then.
Everything was dirt cheap to us. With strong yen, we enjoyed a lifestyle way beyond our means. So, as I grew older, my mother kept on stashing some money aside. To buy Mikimoto pearls from a Japanese department store in Hong Kong whenever she could, for me and for herself. In her mind, it was an “investment”.
The first one she got for me was a single pink pearl about 1 cm big on a dainty gold chain. I LOVED the pearl and wore it very often. Then before I left for college, she got me a double-strand string of pearls - to be worn on formal occasions.
So, needless to say, when I found all my pearls were stolen, I was crushed for sentimental reasons more than anything. But what shocked me even more was just how much Mikimoto pearls were worth in 2013!!!
Being a good ol’ Boy Scout, Scott had photographed the contents of my jewelry box. With a clear record of what we’d owned, our insurance company honored the itemized list of all that were stolen and our claim we filed at the current market value.
When we received the check from the insurance company in the mail, I went straight to my husband and said, “I don’t need to replace my jewelry. Instead, could I take Audrey to meet Lauren Cuthbertson in London??” The burglary happened in February, and we were on our way to London in May…!
Off to London We Go
Audrey and the Big Ben in London
First, I secured our seats for “The Winter’s Tale” at the Covent Garden - choreographed by none other than Christopher Wheeldon. Of course, Lauren Cuthbertson was debuting the ballet in the principal role of Hermione. Added with my love of Shakespeare, I truly felt this was providential. Who could ask for anything more!?
Then, I wrote to Lauren’s personal assistant, Jane, letting her know which performance we were attending. I also asked if we may pop in backstage after the performance, just so Audrey could meet Lauren. For one picture, perhaps?
So, we flew to London – just to meet the principal dancer of The Royal Ballet. Crazy. But we were beyond excited!
At Highclere Castle
I’d never been to London before, and was rather nervous… Yet, as strange as it may sound, as soon as I saw its subway (the Tube) map, I felt instantly at home – because I UNDERSTOOD it (Tokyo’s train/subway map may be modeled after it). London’s double-decker bus was also a comforting sight because I grew up in Hong Kong under the British rule. I rode these buses every day as a teenager - in another continent.
Lauren Cuthbertson gifting her pointe shoes to Audrey
Yes, experiencing London was wonderful. Yes, seeing Lauren perform LIVE was a dream come true – I think we were pinching ourselves the entire show. But what happened after was simply beyond what we’d imagined possible: As soon as the performance was over, we were whisked backstage and into Lauren’s dressing room.
Then, Lauren took Audrey’s hand, literally, and started giving her a backstage tour. Even on to the main stage itself in the now empty theatre, introducing her to some of the other principal dancers and soloists who were milling about. She spent a good 45-minute with Audrey giving her encouragement – and just helping her dream the impossible.
Then, the impossible happened.
The Nutcracker’s Clara
Earlier that year, Audrey went along with a friend for an audition at the San Francisco Ballet School. It is a training school for the oldest professional ballet company in the U.S., San Francisco Ballet. She had auditioned in the spring but was not accepted. Every aspiring dancer on the West Coast dreams of training at San Francisco Ballet School, even though the chance of actually making it to the pro level with the company is extremely slim. Somehow, she ended up auditioning again – and got in!
In the fall after she returned from London, Audrey was cast as one of the five “Clara” dancers for the company’s annual Nutcracker ballet. This is San Francisco Ballet’s signature repertoire that runs for a whole month of December. It features all the company’s best principal dancers, and traditionally, the company has always cast a student from San Francisco Ballet School as young Clara.
Nutcracker ballet is a time-honored tradition many San Franciscans have been taking families to during the Christmas holiday season for generations. Audrey was to perform at the San Francisco’s War Memorial Opera House for the most discerning of all ballet-goers.
Photo credit: Erik Tomasson, San Francisco Ballet
And so she did. Beautifully. It was a thrill for me to be able to chaperone her backstage every time she danced. And to witness all that went on – the hair & makeup, the tiaras and the exquisite costumes… OH, to see all the intricate tutus in piles and piles!!
The only sad thing was that we were not permitted to photograph or videotape any of the performances… so we have no records of her dancing, except a few professional still photographs. But of course, the memory lives on in my heart as vivid as if it were yesterday. ‘Tis the ephemeral nature of stage art. I felt the same way about all the musicals Sammi starred in. Sigh…
After the successful Nutcracker season was over, Audrey applied for the summer intensive program at The Royal Ballet School in London a year later – where Lauren Cuthbertson had also trained as a teen. She spent the summer in London, and turned 16 while there.
You see, if it weren’t for my Mikimoto pearls, none of this could have happened. I do believe things - even bad things - happen for a reason, if only you look at the Big Picture in the long run. We have my mother AND Mikimoto pearls to thank for that!
