A century ago, being cutting edge truly meant breaking the mold, experimenting and arousing astonishment. Especially in a country that was geographically on the edge of the world and culturally a thousand miles away from the great market of the Old Continent. This story started in Kyushu, a small, almost unknown island on the fringes of the Empire of the Rising Sun, where, in 1929, Shunsaku Tasaki, the son of a simple pearl farmer, began to imagine a new way of offering those white gems he knew so well. Or rather, as he always loved to say, a way to “grow, polish and cherish the glorious...