JAPAN 9/9/46
PEARLS FOR EVERYONE
* In a modest, unpainted four-room house atop a narrow headland overlooking Japan's Ago Bay, a wizened little man in a brown kimono and a black derby shuffled about in a pearly haze. He was Kokichi Mikimoto, 89, who has annoyed more oysters for more profit than any other man. Last week the longtime king of Japan's cultured-pearl industry declared the largest personal income in Japan in the first year of American occupation. He had netted 3 million yen ($200,000) selling pearls to the conquerors.
Back in 1890 Mikimoto heard a Japanese zoologist lecture on the possibility of cultivating pearls. Why not implant an irritant like a grain of sand in a baby oyster, and see if the oyster would coat it with layers of nacre and thus form a pearl? In four years Mikimoto had his first, but imperfect, pearl. In 19 years he had so perfected his process that few amateurs could distinguish cultured pearls from natural ones. He expanded to 12 cultivating beds, planting 3 million annoyed three-year-old oysters a year, and got usable pearls from about 5% when they were seven to nine years old. By 1939 the U.S. alone was annually buying about $750,000 worth of cultured pearls a year, half of them Mikimoto's.
The war brought disaster to Mikimoto. B-29s leveled his big Tokyo retail store, strafed his Ago Bay factory. But he still had half a million oysters in the bay, a fortune in pearls in boot boxes around his home. He began selling pearls from his hoard to G.I.s. In Ago Bay his diving girls are again bringing up oysters. Soon he expects to have 1.5 million oysters working for him. His eyes are on his No. 1 market, the U.S. Says he: "I like Americans best. They are straightforward--like children."

PHILIPPINES 8/27/51
KING OF THE ISLANDS
* Don Andres Soriano, 53, keeps a thumb on just about everything that moves in the Philippines. He is the islands' best-known businessman. His fortune is estimated at up to $30 million.
Soriano began his empire building as a 21-year-old accountant in his family's San Miguel Brewery. With brewery profits, he bought mines, dairies, factories, forests, a radio station; he owns the third largest Coca-Cola bottling franchise in the world, acts as agent for five insurance firms, distributor for Philip Morris cigarettes and Lord Calvert whiskey. He controls a Kansas City brewery, gold mines in British East Africa, a development company in Spain. His holdings stretch so far and wide that a top executive says, "I haven't been able to memorize even the names of all the companies yet."