"Mayor of Kobe"

The processing of our finest quality Akoya Pearls was complete and we were summoned by Mr. Nokamora to Kobe to make the final selection.  Mr. Tomokazu Nakamura has been a leader in the Cultured Pearl industry in post war Japan and is a valuable asset to Imperial.  He is our eyes and ears in Japan and believe me  he does hear and see everything; we like to call him the "Mayor of Kobe".

Nakamura-san, as we refer to him, was a teenager at the end of WWII.  His family ran a very successful restaurant before the war and as the eldest son, he was going to take over from his father.  Because of the lack of food in Japan at the end of WWII, he decided not to enter the family business and enter into college to pursue a job at one of the major manufacturing companies.  During college, he won the Macarthur Award for the best English-speaking student in Japan.  (He is self-taught.) 

He completed college and had an interview at Mitsubishi.  The night before the interview he traveled to Tokyo from Kyoto and spent the night at the house of a graduate from the same college he attended.  This man’s name was K. Takashima.  At that time, Takashima was the largest pearl cultivator in Japan and was partners with the Burmese government in the cultivation of the Burmese pearls that we believe were the finest quality pearls ever cultivated.  Nakamura and Takashima talked during the night and Nakamura made a decision to work for Mr. Takashima because cultured pearls were the only export item that Japan had at the time.  He wanted the world to see that Japan can do other things than make war.  The rest is history. 

Nakamura-san is now a director on the Japan Pearl Promotion Society (JPPS) and the South Sea Pearl Consortium.  He has served as an advisor to many of the larger cultured pearl companies in Japan and is friendly with all of the major government officials in Kobe.  He even writes a monthly article for a magazine sponsored by the municipal government of Kobe.  In his spare time, he is a professor of Business English at Doshisha University where he attended college. 

For those of you who want to know what happened to the restaurant, his younger brother took over from his father and it is now one of the top 10 restaurants in Japan and one of its best customers is Prime Minister Koizumi.