Rice and Biwa pearls. MIX lot 100ctw. Lg & Sm mixed sizes and shapes. buying A button or two also.

Natural Biwa / Rice Pearl mix from Japan. New Old Stock.

You will receive a 100ctw baggie from this lot.

These Biwa & Biwa Rice pearls are a product of Japan from the 60s/70s/80s

Japans Lake Biwa pearls are very rare, produced by the tissue method (Without a Mother-of-Pearl bead.) If you receive a round to perfectly round pearl, it will most likely be an Akoya and is cultivated with a mother of pearl bead.

You will receive 100ctw-plus of loose mixed mm size and shapes.

In your lot you could sometimes find a random Akoya, Button, Keshi, full and half buying drilled, and yes even a broken or off drilled pearl. It is a treasure hunt!

These are what I call GBBU:

Good
Bad
Beautifully Ugly.

They're not your perfectly round pearls, although you might get one.

As you can see my pictures they're taken in different lighting, the size and type will vary.

Some have inclusions some are almost perfect and some of these Pearls have the beautiful shine of the Akoya Pearl.

These are not your fast cultured Chinese Pearls that are on today's market, these pearls are vintage, grown with the highest Japanese standards for cultured pearls to give them the highest luster and thickest nacre.

All items are non refundable so please look close at photos.

Contact me if you have any questions that cannot be answered through this listing.

Biwa Characteristics
Kokichi Mikimoto is the man most credited with perfecting the techniques of freshwater pearl culturing. He and his associates, experimenting at Lake Biwa, seeded mussels only with soft mantle tissue. This resulted in an all-nacre pearl of good luster and unusual shape—the rice-grain shape was typical. Biwa pearls also emerged in previously unseen colors, and they could be mass-produced. Technicians could plant many bits of mantle tissue in one mussel, and harvest 15 or 20 small pearls from each. From the 1930s on, Biwa set the standard for freshwater cultured pearl quality, and made pearls more affordable than they had ever been.

Biwa's Decline
Biwa pearls came on the market just when the natural, saltwater pearl fishing industry was going into serious decline. Overfishing and pollution had damaged mollusk beds, especially in the Persian Gulf. By the 1930s, the oil industry there also tempted workers away from the great dangers of pearl diving to safer jobs on land. In less than 50 years, however, Biwa pearl production also declined, thanks to similar factors—pollution at Lake Biwa and fresh competition from abroad, especially China.

Thank you.