#B Asagiri – 朝霧 – Named after the soft blue haze of morning mist.

Welcome.

This is a 9 mm Akoya pearl necklace.

Approximately 764 loose 9 mm pearls went through countless rounds of sorting before eventually becoming 14 strands.
This necklace is one of them.

To put it another way, it is as if 764 students were divided into classes of around 42 people each according to their academic ability.

Forty-two students per class, fourteen classes in total.

What I mean is that this necklace does not exist as merely a single independent strand.

Sometimes in everyday life, during conversations with coworkers or acquaintances, I suddenly feel a strange sense of closeness when I learn that someone has brothers or sisters.
What exactly is that feeling?

Until then, I recognized that person only as an individual, but the moment I hear something like,
“Oh, this person is the middle child of three siblings,”
I somehow begin to feel more familiar with them.

Long ago, I once visited a friend’s family home.
When I met his mother, I noticed that she resembled him in certain ways.
Seeing my friend through his mother’s perspective somehow deepened my sense of intimacy toward him.

“What are you trying to say?”

Well, this is simply how I personally feel about this necklace.

If this necklace had simply been purchased from a pearl dealer called “Doraemon Pearls,” perhaps I would not feel particularly attached to it.

I would probably think:
“A necklace with somewhat weak luster, pale color, but nice near-round shape.”

But originally, this necklace existed within a collection of 764 pearls.

These 42 pearls came from within those 764.

 

Through repeated encounters and separations called sorting, this necklace came into existence.

So when I look at this necklace, I see far more than just these 42 pearls.

“You only feel that way because you were the one who sorted them. What nonsense are you talking about?”

That is absolutely true.

But there is a tremendous difference between seeing things absolutely and seeing them relatively.

Knowing someone’s family structure, their pet’s name, their grandfather’s name, even the remaining balance on their home loan, creates a completely different impression compared to knowing nothing beyond the person standing in front of you.

Basically, I like people, so I often feel the urge to ask about their environment and family in order to know them better.
Of course, I try not to make it feel like stalking or a police interrogation.

The more I learn about someone, the more interested I become in them.

The process itself is fascinating because it is full of discoveries.

At the same time, the more you ask, the more similarities you notice between people.
That is interesting too.

You discover both the universal truth that “people are basically all quite similar,” and also the moments where you think,
“This person’s family environment is rather unusual.”

“So what exactly are you trying to say?”

To be honest, I find it extremely difficult to write about this necklace.

Usually, writing feels like digging endlessly into a sandbox.
But this time, it feels as though I immediately hit hard ground.

As the name Asagiri suggests, the luster of this necklace is rather subdued.

I often describe pearls as having “gentle luster,” but these pearls may be a little too gentle.

This is unrelated, but when I was in my early twenties, a girl I liked once told me directly:
“You are kind, but you are too kind, and therefore boring.”

Time stopped for a moment.

Later, she ended up dating exactly the kind of exciting man she had wanted.
And after she got married, she jokingly told me,
“Actually, maybe your kindness was better after all.”

Anyway, back to the pearls.

These pearls are pale in color.
Not truly blue, but rather gray.

However, their shape is near-round.
Compared to the other strands, this is a considerable advantage.

Personally, I love baroque pearls.
But in the pearl world, round pearls are the overwhelming majority.

If the pearl world were a democracy, round pearls would forever remain the ruling party.

Baroque pearls would probably remain the eternal opposition party.
And realistically speaking, that makes sense.

Still, perhaps it is important to occasionally listen to the opinions of the eternal opposition.

As of May 25, 2026, strands A, D, E, G, and I from this 9 mm series have been made into necklaces and listed.
Someone is currently considering strand A.
D and I are listed for sale, while E and I have already been sold.

 

This necklace is strand B.

On my YouTube channel, the entire process of sorting the 764 pearls into strands has been recorded.
Sixteen videos totaling around twenty-one hours.

“Who would watch that?”
“Why would you even do that?”
“Did you really think someone would watch it?”

These videos are simply work journals, and I felt that having them was better than not having them.

Also, in those videos, the strands are labeled A through N from an early stage, so their origins can be traced.

Still, the videos are so long that I hesitate even jokingly to say,
“Please watch them.”

Oh, that reminds me.

This is completely unrelated.

Flower Jem first began selling on Etsy.
About two years later, I created an independent website.

At that time, I searched for websites that could serve as references.
When I researched which company sold the most pearls online in the world, I found Pearl Paradise.

This is only based on my own research, so I do not know whether it is objectively true.

I modeled the structure of my website after theirs.

Until then, I had never even heard of the company.

After that, I occasionally checked Pearl Paradise’s website and activities, and through that process, I became aware of Kojima Pearl.

The pearls and designs they sell are different from Flower Jem’s, but somehow, I gradually began to feel that our values toward pearls might actually be quite similar.

“In what way are they similar?”

Even if you asked me, I could not fully explain it in words.
I just somehow feel it.

Recently, Hisano from Pearl Paradise visited Tsushima and toured a pearl farm once owned by the company where I used to work.

That moved me tremendously.

I immediately called the farm manager.

Meanwhile, he calmly said,
“Yeah, some foreign visitors came by.”

There was quite a difference in emotional temperature between us.

For pearl farmers, the goal is simply to sell pearls at the annual auctions for the highest possible price.
Information about wholesalers, processors, or retailers rarely reaches them, and they usually do not have the time to pay attention to such things.

As a result, they know very little about pearl retailers.

Sometimes, when pearl farmers visit jewelry stores, they become deeply moved seeing pearls like the ones they raise transformed into beautiful jewelry.

At the same time, because they sort enormous quantities of pearls every year, their eyes are extremely trained.

As a result, some of them can casually say rather shocking things without any bad intentions.

Once, during a company trip, I entered a jewelry store in Osaka together with several pearl farm workers from Tsushima.

One of them suddenly said,
“Wait… is it really okay to sell pearls with nacre this thin?”

I immediately apologized to the store staff and explained that these people worked in pearl cultivation and came from rural Tsushima, where jewelry stores were rare.

The staff quickly understood, and before long, an impromptu pearl lecture began inside the shop.

In the end, the staff member said,
“I learned things about pearls here that I have never heard anywhere else.”

Anyway, back to the story.

To me, Pearl Paradise feels like people from television or movies.

So the fact that people like that visited the farm where I once worked genuinely moved me.

And recently, I discovered that one of my customers is actually close friends with Sarah from Kojima Pearl.

That customer introduced Flower Jem’s Instagram to Sarah, and Sarah followed Flower Jem on Instagram.

This only happened recently, so it still feels unreal, almost dreamlike.

I am simply happy, but also strangely nervous.

Unfortunately, the pearl dealers around me do not even know Pearl Paradise or Kojima Pearl, so there is nobody I can really share this excitement with.

So I shared it here instead.

“Forget all that. You should be promoting this necklace.”

That is true, but honestly, the necklace already looks exactly as it does in the photos.

Somehow, while working a full-time weekday job, I continue running Flower Jem at the same time.

Almost all of my private time has become pearl time.

The one saving grace is that my private time genuinely feels meaningful because it revolves around pearls.

The only slightly sad thing is that I cannot return to my family home as often as I would like.

I miss Lulu.

That said, I probably still return home as much as, or even more than, my brothers do.

Even within limited time, the fact that customers have gradually increased, and that I was able to connect with people from pearl shops I admire through Instagram, makes me genuinely happy.

I do not particularly want to become rich by selling many pearls.
Nor do I strongly desire for Flower Jem to become famous.

I simply wish to share pearls that I personally find beautiful with people who love pearls, or people who have newly come to love them.

“If you think like that, your shop will never become big.”

I understand that.

But I think it is something extremely important.

In my case, it simply happens to be pearls, but devoting time and passion to something, then sharing the emotions and inspiration that arise from it with others, feels deeply important as a human being.

To me, it feels almost like blessed rain.

Actually… do dogs experience that kind of emotional resonance too?

Well, never mind the dogs.

 

By the way, I have practiced guitar as a hobby for about thirty-one years now.

Yet compared to pearls, I have experienced far fewer moments of emotional connection or shared excitement through guitar.

It is strange.

I have played live shows and done many things, but they never reached the same level of emotion I experience through pearls.

Rather than sharing emotions with others, guitar often felt more like a tool for challenging things I could not accomplish alone.

Anyway, it is now almost 1 a.m. on Sunday.

Once again, I intended to sleep early, yet here I am at the usual hour.

This piece became even less organized than usual, but as always, I wrote honestly — following my thoughts freely, and sometimes even following the absence of thoughts.

I feel that if I dug just a little deeper, I might finally reach what my heart is trying to say right now.

But this time, it seems I could not quite get there.

This necklace, Asagiri, is a very modest pearl necklace.

That is why it is called Asagiri.

Like morning haze.
Like that unique atmosphere just before the day fully begins.

Even this product description itself has become somewhat hazy and unresolved, as though covered in morning mist.

A necklace with the quiet brightness and subdued luster of something waiting for the beginning of a new day within the morning fog.

How does it look to you?