p e a r l
God in heaven, he’ll strangle me, no, he’ll lecture me, that’s worse: How can I trust you with anything important if you can’t even . . . I’ll blame the maid. Can’t blame the maid, he knows she doesn’t touch my jewels. There goes one under the—catch it, you stupid girl! Why he told her not to touch. Another one by the curtain, the other curtain, see it? First good gift he ever gave me, first lecture too, his purity of affection, because, you see, pearls symbolize purity and affection. And heaven. Wealth and prestige of the nation. And maidenhood, God help us. The timelessness of pearls, he said. No, that was at our tenth anniversary when I wore . . . Hang it, there’s one right here under my slipper. Ten years before that, he already knew, he said. That’s why he gave me pearls. Elegance both modest and exotic, he said. And if not the fashion, pearls are always in fashion. That was on our twentieth, and I think it was a quote. For heaven’s sake, how should I know how many? And they’re all matched to perfection, he said, all exactly alike, and how’s that for a miracle of pure, wild nature. Oh, Tilly, you know that bit about “let no man put asunder”? That’s what he said when he gave . . .and now look what I . . . Oh, I’m terrible, horrible, how did I ever get so—oh, it doesn’t even look like a neck anymore, it looks like a, like a blob about to explode! I’ve let him down, it’s unforgivable, he hasn’t said a word. But he must’ve liked my neck, all those years ago, to give it such exquisite . . . Tilly’s laughing at me, I know it, she’ll tell everybody how the mistress got out her pearl necklace, went to fasten it around her fat blob of a neck, and then it popped and then the pearls flying rolling scattering every which way, his first good gift to her in fragments. Shattered! He’ll find some kind of metaphor for fragments. Some analogy with shattered, scattered pearls, and that look of his, oh I can’t bear it! Tilly, I know what to do! Remember we heard about those, from China or, no, Japan. Some magazine, that man who said he’d put a pearl necklace on every neck, guess they can train oysters like cows or—cultured pearls, that’s it. Even my piddly allowance . . . and he’ll never know the difference, right? They’re pearls like any other, right? But when you need them, they show up on time. Quick, go order a cab!
1853. The United States forced the Tokugawa shogunate in Japan to accept unfair trade terms by sending warships to threaten Japan with cannon fire.
1893. Mikimoto Kōkichi, under the guidance of marine biologists, forced an oyster to produce a pearl by surgically inserting an irritant (nucleus) into its soft tissues.
1899. Mikimoto’s first boutique opened in Tokyo, introducing customers to his “invention,” cultured pearls.
1907. “The favorites of fortune the world over in all ages have succumbed to the modest beauty of the pearl. Its ascendancy marks not alone the refinement of the individuals with whom it finds favor, but the high status of the nation where it is widely appreciated.” (Cattelle, The Pearl)
1911. “Perhaps it would interest you to know more about this wonderful and precious jewel which could not only reflect the beauties of other gems, but also put power into the hand of the feeble wise man to save a poor girl from a life of misery.” (Mikimoto, Japanese Culture Pearls)
c. 1916. In the US Midwest and South, button manufacture from freshwater-mussel nacre, a multimillion-dollar industry, began its rapid decline, having decimated its mussel species of choice.
1927. On a visit to US factories, Mikimoto found that mussels considered inferior for button production made ideal nuclei for cultured pearls. He shipped the mussels to Japan, ground their shells into fragments, and implanted the fragments in Akoya oysters.
1930s. “Even as Mikimoto’s cultivation operations relocated pearl oysters to cages and his female workforce out of the water and into shellfish surgical wards, Pearl Island put shellfish ama divers on display in the flesh. It was a new captive environment not [only] for animals but [also] for people.” (Ericson, “Nature’s Helper”)
1955. “Furthermore, American women were wearing more of his necklaces than any other women in the world.” (Eunson, The Pearl King: The Story of the Fabulous Mikimoto)
1893. Mikimoto Kōkichi, under the guidance of marine biologists, forced an oyster to produce a pearl by surgically inserting an irritant (nucleus) into its soft tissues.
1899. Mikimoto’s first boutique opened in Tokyo, introducing customers to his “invention,” cultured pearls.
1907. “The favorites of fortune the world over in all ages have succumbed to the modest beauty of the pearl. Its ascendancy marks not alone the refinement of the individuals with whom it finds favor, but the high status of the nation where it is widely appreciated.” (Cattelle, The Pearl)
1911. “Perhaps it would interest you to know more about this wonderful and precious jewel which could not only reflect the beauties of other gems, but also put power into the hand of the feeble wise man to save a poor girl from a life of misery.” (Mikimoto, Japanese Culture Pearls)
c. 1916. In the US Midwest and South, button manufacture from freshwater-mussel nacre, a multimillion-dollar industry, began its rapid decline, having decimated its mussel species of choice.
1927. On a visit to US factories, Mikimoto found that mussels considered inferior for button production made ideal nuclei for cultured pearls. He shipped the mussels to Japan, ground their shells into fragments, and implanted the fragments in Akoya oysters.
1930s. “Even as Mikimoto’s cultivation operations relocated pearl oysters to cages and his female workforce out of the water and into shellfish surgical wards, Pearl Island put shellfish ama divers on display in the flesh. It was a new captive environment not [only] for animals but [also] for people.” (Ericson, “Nature’s Helper”)
1955. “Furthermore, American women were wearing more of his necklaces than any other women in the world.” (Eunson, The Pearl King: The Story of the Fabulous Mikimoto)
m u s s e l
You’re having a snack on a day like any other with your hinge snuggling down into the sediment, tasting waterborne morsels with your cilia through parted shells as the river flows through you within you around you as it flows on days like this throughout the season, when suddenly the world convulses in a groan, the water is convulsing with the growl of a great strain, the sediment itself is shuddering and writhing and what can you do you only have one foot, you sense the contourless presence of a huge thing, taste the metal in the water, and that taste is known to you and dreaded although you cannot name it, the huge thing penetrates the sediment with metal cilia hooked and clawed, the thing as long as a tree is tall is dragging thousands of crowfoot claws through the sediment, raking and ripping your neighborhood from the riverbed, one of your neighbors aborts all her growing babies in terror, a hook shoves itself between your shells and you resist, resist in the only way you know, clamp your shells together and wrestle with the hook, you are wrestling the hook and being torn out of the sediment, shooting through the water and flying through the air in ways that you would never have believed, never in your life—the hook rips out of you, a searing flash of pain, bits of your flesh tossed overboard as you are thrown down on the deck, so hard so dry where is the river the water the water, you hold your shells together with all your might, keep what moisture you have in you, hold on to the water, you are wounded, you’re in pain, you are thrown hither and thither, crashing into dry hard things and crazed with fear, you don’t even want to guess why you have fallen, why it’s getting hotter and hotter, you don’t understand that you are being cooked and it’s your insides sizzling, twenty interminable minutes it will take for you to die, and you will die with your shells open, the shells are all they want, the softness of you ripped out of you they will throw—toss your shell onto a heap of thousands, hundreds of thousands of shelled relatives’ and strangers’ hollow corpses, then more flying and somebody will cut your shell into fragments, press each fragment between sheets of iron to grind down its edges, grind away the final vestiges of your sharpness, but by then you will not know yourself, you will be shattered, you will be unrecognizable as having been a mussel having been a living animal—except to those who inspect the nacreous protobeads, nurdlish pollutants that they purchase by the ton.
1946. “It is directed that the Imperial Japanese Government take immediate action to prohibit all transactions involving the sale or transfer of polished and unpolished pearls, both natural and cultured, loose or in strands, or in miscellaneous jewelry, except: (a) Above described pearls intended for sale in the United States Army Exchange Central Purchasing Office. . . . An inventory of all Japanese-owned pearls, including pearls owned by the Imperial Japanese Government or its agencies, as described in paragraph 1[,] will be made out in triplicate.” (General Headquarters, Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, AG 091.33 ESS-IE APO 500 SCAPIN 593, Memorandum For: The Imperial Japanese Government. Through: Central Liaison Office, Tokyo. January 14, 1946)
1946. “It is directed that the Imperial Japanese Government will immediately cause to be made available to the Army Exchange Central Purchasing Office, each week three thousand five hundred (3,500) strands of cultured pearls, three hundred (300) matched sets of three (3) cultured pearls each, and such quantities of pearl rings, pins, earrings, and other pearl articles as may be requested. These pearls will be delivered to the Army [etc.] by noon Tuesday of each week unless otherwise directed.” (General Headquarters, Supreme Commander, etc., SCAPIN 981-A, April 13, 1946)
1949. “The entire product of the culture pearl industry now is sold to occupation personnel or exported to the United States.” (Cahn, Report No. 122, Natural Resources Section, General HQ, Supreme etc., October 31, 1949)
1950s. “The United States became the sole supplier of shell for [Japan’s] rapidly growing cultured pearl industry and remains the principal supplier today. Few people who own cultured pearls produced in the last 50 years are aware that their gems consist of only a thin veneer of exotic pearl oyster nacre and are composed primarily of freshwater mussel shell most likely from Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, or Tennessee.” (Haag, North American Freshwater Mussels)
1954. J. R. Latendresse founded the Tennessee Shell Company to export freshwater-mussel nacre to the Japanese cultured-pearl industry.
1961. Latendresse founded the American Pearl Company to import Japanese cultured pearls to the United States.
2012. “Harvest by the button industry and, later, the cultured pearl industry is widely and correctly cited as a major threat to mussel populations. . . . Systematic habitat destruction overlaid onto a wide variety of other impacts resulted in the first mass extinction of North American freshwater mussels.” (Haag, North American Freshwater Mussels)
1946. “It is directed that the Imperial Japanese Government will immediately cause to be made available to the Army Exchange Central Purchasing Office, each week three thousand five hundred (3,500) strands of cultured pearls, three hundred (300) matched sets of three (3) cultured pearls each, and such quantities of pearl rings, pins, earrings, and other pearl articles as may be requested. These pearls will be delivered to the Army [etc.] by noon Tuesday of each week unless otherwise directed.” (General Headquarters, Supreme Commander, etc., SCAPIN 981-A, April 13, 1946)
1949. “The entire product of the culture pearl industry now is sold to occupation personnel or exported to the United States.” (Cahn, Report No. 122, Natural Resources Section, General HQ, Supreme etc., October 31, 1949)
1950s. “The United States became the sole supplier of shell for [Japan’s] rapidly growing cultured pearl industry and remains the principal supplier today. Few people who own cultured pearls produced in the last 50 years are aware that their gems consist of only a thin veneer of exotic pearl oyster nacre and are composed primarily of freshwater mussel shell most likely from Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, or Tennessee.” (Haag, North American Freshwater Mussels)
1954. J. R. Latendresse founded the Tennessee Shell Company to export freshwater-mussel nacre to the Japanese cultured-pearl industry.
1961. Latendresse founded the American Pearl Company to import Japanese cultured pearls to the United States.
2012. “Harvest by the button industry and, later, the cultured pearl industry is widely and correctly cited as a major threat to mussel populations. . . . Systematic habitat destruction overlaid onto a wide variety of other impacts resulted in the first mass extinction of North American freshwater mussels.” (Haag, North American Freshwater Mussels)
a m a
You say you want to marry me because you came on the ferry that brings all those thousands of people to Pearl Island, and so you are supporting me already. You say you watch from the island as the red-roofed boat takes me and other ama to the demonstration grounds. You stand among the visitors and watch us carry on “tradition.” You say I’m the loveliest pearl diver in Japan.
What do you know of me? My legs? My bottom? My white skirt tumbling around my hips when I go down headfirst into the water? Half the time, I’m holding my breath on the ocean floor, ten meters below. The smile. I see. The smile. When I bring up an oyster. Just one oyster, so all of you can see it in my hand as I raise it high in triumph before dropping it in the bucket. We ama are the true pearls of Pearl Island, yes, I know. All those men from Tokyo and America, do you think they’re really interested in watching my great-auntie muck around with scalpels, sticking bits of imported mussel shell and bits of local oysters into oysters?
You say that you and I already understand each other. But did you know I’m not really a pearl diver? This morning a lot of us went diving for seaweed. Soon it will be awabi season. And sea cucumbers. And you know these oysters are good to eat. You’ll say I think too much; but I do think, if you must harm an animal or something, it better be for food, not flashy ornaments. I’m a hunter. As we ama have been hunters for generations. Except at Pearl Island. Here, I don’t know what I am. If that oyster I raised high in triumph stood a chance of having a pearl, do you think they’d let us use it in demonstrations?
My grandmother used to mother the oysters here. They really did live on the bottom then. It was up to ama to make sure they were healthy, not befouled by snails or algae. When they were old enough, my grandmother ferried them to deeper water. Then brought them ashore for their surgical operation. Nearly a minute underwater; she used to try for ten oysters per breath. Her mother hunted them in the wild and sold them alive to Mikimoto-san. He calls oysters “mothers” too, you know. But what’s growing in them isn’t life. And they aren’t mothered anymore. They hang in cages from the cultivation rafts, and Mikimoto-san has men to pull the cages out and lower them down. Those men couldn’t hold their breath for as long as a blink. They don’t even get their feet wet.
What am I? Oh, bits and pieces. Fragments of history and emptiness. Those white costumes aren’t “traditional,” by the way. I can’t think of anything more impractical for diving. It’s for show. It’s what Westerners want to see, and it complements the pearls. As do I. I’m an ornament for ornaments. And if you want to marry an ama, you’d better get used to being spoken to and spoken back to. Scattered she may be, but this ornament supports herself.
What do you know of me? My legs? My bottom? My white skirt tumbling around my hips when I go down headfirst into the water? Half the time, I’m holding my breath on the ocean floor, ten meters below. The smile. I see. The smile. When I bring up an oyster. Just one oyster, so all of you can see it in my hand as I raise it high in triumph before dropping it in the bucket. We ama are the true pearls of Pearl Island, yes, I know. All those men from Tokyo and America, do you think they’re really interested in watching my great-auntie muck around with scalpels, sticking bits of imported mussel shell and bits of local oysters into oysters?
You say that you and I already understand each other. But did you know I’m not really a pearl diver? This morning a lot of us went diving for seaweed. Soon it will be awabi season. And sea cucumbers. And you know these oysters are good to eat. You’ll say I think too much; but I do think, if you must harm an animal or something, it better be for food, not flashy ornaments. I’m a hunter. As we ama have been hunters for generations. Except at Pearl Island. Here, I don’t know what I am. If that oyster I raised high in triumph stood a chance of having a pearl, do you think they’d let us use it in demonstrations?
My grandmother used to mother the oysters here. They really did live on the bottom then. It was up to ama to make sure they were healthy, not befouled by snails or algae. When they were old enough, my grandmother ferried them to deeper water. Then brought them ashore for their surgical operation. Nearly a minute underwater; she used to try for ten oysters per breath. Her mother hunted them in the wild and sold them alive to Mikimoto-san. He calls oysters “mothers” too, you know. But what’s growing in them isn’t life. And they aren’t mothered anymore. They hang in cages from the cultivation rafts, and Mikimoto-san has men to pull the cages out and lower them down. Those men couldn’t hold their breath for as long as a blink. They don’t even get their feet wet.
What am I? Oh, bits and pieces. Fragments of history and emptiness. Those white costumes aren’t “traditional,” by the way. I can’t think of anything more impractical for diving. It’s for show. It’s what Westerners want to see, and it complements the pearls. As do I. I’m an ornament for ornaments. And if you want to marry an ama, you’d better get used to being spoken to and spoken back to. Scattered she may be, but this ornament supports herself.
1911. “It may perhaps interest the reader that a large part of the submarine work, such as the transplanting of the oysters, spreading them out on the beds, taking them out of the sea or putting them back there is done by women divers [ama]. This is universal in the Ago Bay and in many other parts of Japan. There has been a belief from time immemorial that women can work better and longer under water than men, and the women divers of Ise are often mentioned in classic literature. Perhaps this curious condition of things may furnish the modern student of social science an excellent opportunity to investigate the effect of the transference of the wage-earning to the women.” (Mikimoto, Japanese Culture Pearls)
1936. “A million and a half akoyagai pearl oyster shells can be piled far higher than a standing person. In late 1936, a man named Mikimoto Kōkichi walked in the shadow cast by one such mound. . . . In order to atone for this, Mikimoto explained, he had decided to hold a Buddhist memorial ceremony (kuyō) on his company’s island theme park, a landmass he called Pearl Island (Shinjugashima). Around thirty Pure Land (Jōdoshū) monks recited sutras in front of a massive altar that had been constructed over four frantic days. More than a hundred of the company’s wage-laboring female divers assembled nearby. Print reporters and a Paramount newsreel cameraman recorded the proceedings for dissemination inside and outside the Japanese empire.” (Ericson, “Nature’s Helper”)
1968. “And this thinking, fed by the present, works with the ‘thought fragments’ it can wrest from the past and gather about itself. Like a pearl diver who descends to the bottom of the sea, not to excavate the bottom and bring it to light but to pry loose the rich and the strange, the pearls and the coral in the depths, and to carry them to the surface, this thinking delves into the depths of the past—but not in order to resuscitate it the way it was and to contribute to the renewal of extinct ages. What guides this thinking is the conviction that although the living is subject to the ruin of the time, the process of decay is at the same time a process of crystallization, that in the depth of the sea, into which sinks and is dissolved what once was alive, some things ‘suffer a sea-change’ and survive in new crystallized forms.” (Arendt, “Walter Benjamin,” The New Yorker)
1990. “The exhibits and brochures on the museum island called Mikimoto Pearl Island located in Toba City make it clear that the ama always dived for various things and not just for the pearl oysters which Mikimoto Kōkichi would then buy up for his experiments in the creation of the cultured pearl. No tourist, foreign or Japanese, ever seems to take in this fact. Thus, since the perfection of the cultured pearl in 1893, the image of ama as pearl-divers has developed so forcefully that it is almost impossible to convince people that this is in fact false.” (Martinez, “Tourism and the Ama,” Unwrapping Japan)
1936. “A million and a half akoyagai pearl oyster shells can be piled far higher than a standing person. In late 1936, a man named Mikimoto Kōkichi walked in the shadow cast by one such mound. . . . In order to atone for this, Mikimoto explained, he had decided to hold a Buddhist memorial ceremony (kuyō) on his company’s island theme park, a landmass he called Pearl Island (Shinjugashima). Around thirty Pure Land (Jōdoshū) monks recited sutras in front of a massive altar that had been constructed over four frantic days. More than a hundred of the company’s wage-laboring female divers assembled nearby. Print reporters and a Paramount newsreel cameraman recorded the proceedings for dissemination inside and outside the Japanese empire.” (Ericson, “Nature’s Helper”)
1968. “And this thinking, fed by the present, works with the ‘thought fragments’ it can wrest from the past and gather about itself. Like a pearl diver who descends to the bottom of the sea, not to excavate the bottom and bring it to light but to pry loose the rich and the strange, the pearls and the coral in the depths, and to carry them to the surface, this thinking delves into the depths of the past—but not in order to resuscitate it the way it was and to contribute to the renewal of extinct ages. What guides this thinking is the conviction that although the living is subject to the ruin of the time, the process of decay is at the same time a process of crystallization, that in the depth of the sea, into which sinks and is dissolved what once was alive, some things ‘suffer a sea-change’ and survive in new crystallized forms.” (Arendt, “Walter Benjamin,” The New Yorker)
1990. “The exhibits and brochures on the museum island called Mikimoto Pearl Island located in Toba City make it clear that the ama always dived for various things and not just for the pearl oysters which Mikimoto Kōkichi would then buy up for his experiments in the creation of the cultured pearl. No tourist, foreign or Japanese, ever seems to take in this fact. Thus, since the perfection of the cultured pearl in 1893, the image of ama as pearl-divers has developed so forcefully that it is almost impossible to convince people that this is in fact false.” (Martinez, “Tourism and the Ama,” Unwrapping Japan)
o y s t e r
First they make you think you’re suffocating, then the water returns, and you gasp, you gape—< >—no sooner do you part your shells than do they stick a peg between—!—and now you’re stuck—stuck—your insides showing—you’d scream if you weren’t a / you’d gasp if you weren’t stuck / writhe if you were an animal capable of writhing, now you’re in a tray / how many oysters back to back and back to front, you’re all standing on your hinges like index cards in a catalog /////// every one of you is stuck /!//!//!//!//!/ with your valves open, all of you moving together, sweeping away all together, not as in a tsunami but with an uncanny, deadly, the pitilessness of an octopus but worse—you are not the one who’s having bits of their inside cut off, fragments sliced off their mantle frill which makes their shell they cannot make their shell without the mantle but there goes a scalpel—!—agony without the luxury of screams, without screams they just go on ignoring that you are a You, you are the one who must receive — — on the desk, the brass “desk clamp” is a horrible mockery clamping down on your back and front—[< >]—as you’ve clamped down on the awful <!> peg in sheer terror, now you must receive — — the “spatula” stroking your mantle folds (you want to be sick, but they want you to take your time with it), the “retractor hook” pulls on your foot and holds it down and now you can’t even wiggle oh if you could faint—they’re forcing into you the sliced-off fragment of the other one—another oyster just like you, a fragment of their body going right into your body into your insides with the “graft lifter” and another terrible hook—“nucleus lifter”—shoving—a horrid cuboid protobead from a dead mussel into your insides with the piece of the other, whom you don’t even — — /— next thing you know, the taste of ocean—~~—and a crowd in a cage, all of you being sick—or if you’d rather think of it as rejection of a transplant that you didn’t ask for, a wound with shrapnel stuck inside it — — the spewing and disgorging taking several years if you survive the “convalescence raft” / even if you survive intact, you are shattered, this violation that you don’t understand at all / wounding for the sake of wounding, specifically to make you do what bodies do when they are wounded or invaded / the fragments remaining of yourself can’t understand a body existing to be broken / living in order to be wounded and this isn’t even your first time // still you, mollusk that you are, you are resilient, oceanic as you are you cannot help but give of yourself—even to the thing /?/ the shrapnel inside you must look decent before you spit it out into the ocean (you still think that’s what will happen, you innocent soul), therefore you will varnish it with your mantle / your agony / your shattered memory / your very own nacre / you will beautify it as you do the interior of your home / make it resemble something —( )— bearable / an end, an end—Ω—// you will claim it to deny it / forget it forever: <º>.
1905. A toxic algal bloom killed 80 percent of Mikimoto’s oysters despite efforts by hundreds of ama to evacuate them to safer waters.
1936. “To date I have killed 150 million pearl oysters. I began as a helper in an udon shop, but I have gained position and wealth. Holding this memorial has lifted a weight off my chest. I can now enter the Land of Ultimate Bliss without hesitation. But my goal is to live to the age of eighty-eight. I will kill 500 million oysters by the time I die. At that time there will be an even bigger ceremony.” (Mikimoto translated by Ericson, oyster-memorial speech, Pearl Island)
1987. “‘The moon-bright pearl is the oyster’s malady but my profit. . . .’ What captures our eyes, this beauty, is no more than an irritation to the shellfish itself. This is what makes the pearl. . . . Who can say if beautiful things are beautiful because they are twisted, or if they are twisted because they are beautiful?” (Shibusawa translated by Boyd, Takaoka’s Travels)
1998. “Japanese-owned Tennessee Shell Company pled guilty to a felony violation of the Lacey Act, which prohibits interstate commerce in protected wildlife species. Evidence showed that the company knowingly purchased and later exported shells harvested illegally from closed waters . . . [but] several witnesses, including shellers and buyers, died under mysterious circumstances.” (Haag, North American Freshwater Mussels)
2012. Because “the Japanese pearl culture industry suffered serious damage from the occurrence of red tides in the early 1990s and red coloration disease in the late ’90s . . . researchers used a domestic pearl oyster strain that is preserved by the Pearl Research Institute, Mikimoto Co., Ltd., for the pearl oyster genome-sequencing project. The genome will provide the fundamental information for understanding the secret of brilliant Japanese pearls and for the conservation of the domestic strain.” (Okinawa Institute for Science and Technology, “OIST Scientists Decode the Pearl Oyster Genome”)
1936. “To date I have killed 150 million pearl oysters. I began as a helper in an udon shop, but I have gained position and wealth. Holding this memorial has lifted a weight off my chest. I can now enter the Land of Ultimate Bliss without hesitation. But my goal is to live to the age of eighty-eight. I will kill 500 million oysters by the time I die. At that time there will be an even bigger ceremony.” (Mikimoto translated by Ericson, oyster-memorial speech, Pearl Island)
1987. “‘The moon-bright pearl is the oyster’s malady but my profit. . . .’ What captures our eyes, this beauty, is no more than an irritation to the shellfish itself. This is what makes the pearl. . . . Who can say if beautiful things are beautiful because they are twisted, or if they are twisted because they are beautiful?” (Shibusawa translated by Boyd, Takaoka’s Travels)
1998. “Japanese-owned Tennessee Shell Company pled guilty to a felony violation of the Lacey Act, which prohibits interstate commerce in protected wildlife species. Evidence showed that the company knowingly purchased and later exported shells harvested illegally from closed waters . . . [but] several witnesses, including shellers and buyers, died under mysterious circumstances.” (Haag, North American Freshwater Mussels)
2012. Because “the Japanese pearl culture industry suffered serious damage from the occurrence of red tides in the early 1990s and red coloration disease in the late ’90s . . . researchers used a domestic pearl oyster strain that is preserved by the Pearl Research Institute, Mikimoto Co., Ltd., for the pearl oyster genome-sequencing project. The genome will provide the fundamental information for understanding the secret of brilliant Japanese pearls and for the conservation of the domestic strain.” (Okinawa Institute for Science and Technology, “OIST Scientists Decode the Pearl Oyster Genome”)
( ... collage by Kathryn Eddy ... )