| Hi All,
The Strack book has pages 405-417 lots of info about Lake Biwa and its pearls, including numerous photos. Strack compares the colors to those of today's freshwaters--with pink and orange, violet, browns, whites and creams. Many of the photos look like the high quality freshwater keishi pearls we can purchase today, good lustre, irregular surface, somewhat flattened. There were a few rounds produced using mop nucleus, but most used epithelium tissue implant. Varying the size of the implant allowed production of "sometimes bizarre, fancy shapes, ......bars, double bars, cross-over bars, crosses, dragons, sticks, buttons, triangles, butterflies, shapes with a jagged outline, letters of the alphabet, etc," to quote Elizabeth Strack. This is how the bar and stick pearls and so many others came to be called biwa pearls, a usage which she says is now generally accepted.
Pattye
so many pearls, so little time |