Time flies, and we’re already approaching the halfway point of the year.
Just like last year, I spend my weekdays doing work unrelated to pearls, and weekends immersed in pearl-related tasks.
In the first half of this year, I focused on writing blog posts and editing YouTube videos. Lately, I’ve been absorbed in silver engraving.
Every Friday night, I return from Osaka to my home in Kobe to work with pearls.
I usually arrive home around 8 p.m., and without delay, begin working—engraving silver, creating pearl pieces, or sorting pearls, depending on the situation. I continue until around 2 a.m. before finally going to bed.
On Saturdays, I often wake up around 8 a.m., clean my room, and then pick up where I left off the night before. If the weather is good, I ride my motorcycle for about an hour—sometimes to Suma Beach, which is just a 20-minute ride away. I spend 20 minutes there and 20 minutes riding back.
When I pause to gaze at the sea, I sometimes find myself wondering, “What am I doing with my life?” But each time, I come back to the same answer—I want to keep working with pearls.
Back home, I work all afternoon and deep into the night—stringing necklaces, engraving, editing videos, fixing website bugs. I sometimes pass out from fatigue. Saturday nights also usually end around 2 a.m.
Sundays are more or less the same, except I start feeling a little rushed as I need to return to Osaka. Ideally, I’d leave Kobe around 7 p.m. and arrive in Osaka by 8, but in reality, I often don’t leave until 9 or 10.
Once I arrive in Osaka around 11 p.m., I cook rice and prepare a bento for the next day. I sneak in a bath and do some social media and YouTube edits before going to bed around 1 a.m., if I’m lucky.
Monday mornings are, unsurprisingly, brutal. My body is tired, and my head is foggy. With both physical labor and desk work awaiting me, it’s tough.
Of course, some weekends I visit my parents and spend time with my mother and Lulu. But otherwise, this is my regular routine. Perhaps that’s why time seems to fly.
My head is constantly spinning: “Next I’ll do this, then that… oh, I still haven’t done that.” Just making pearl jewelry takes a lot of time.
Back in 2019, when I first joined Etsy, all I did was make and list pearl necklaces and earrings. That was it. I later started Instagram and X (formerly Twitter), which still wasn’t too demanding.
Then I built a website. Then YouTube. At first, I posted raw, unedited videos, so it was manageable. But once I started editing—especially adding subtitles—it became much more time-consuming. A few minutes of subtitles can take hours.
Silverwork, too, takes a lot of time.
When I tell pearl industry folks what I’ve been up to, they say, “You’ll never have enough time doing all that.” They’re absolutely right.
But I can’t stop—this is just who I am.
When I finish a piece of jewelry, I feel compelled to write about it, or make a video. If I were the customer, I’d think, “It’s not essential, but I’d like to see the process.”
Many online products look flawless in photos. But occasionally, you receive something and think, “Wait… this isn’t quite what I expected.”
With pearls especially, how they look under sunlight differs from how they appear indoors. They change with the light’s strength and angle.
So I try to show not only the polished, perfectly posed shots of pearls, but also their bare faces—their sleepy expressions, their laughs, their tears, their vulnerable sides.
It’s like saying, “This pearl is beautiful, but it has its flaws too… and that’s okay. Let’s be friends.”
By the way, I was once married. My ex-wife was wonderful—until the day after our engagement. She began to change. We got engaged in May and married in October. I was so worried that I even asked my boss in August if I should go through with it.
It turned out that the pearl I thought I bought was stunning on the screen… but when it arrived, it was completely different.
To be clear, I don’t sell pearls of poor quality. But people have different values. Some customers understand thick nacre but still can’t tolerate even tiny flaws.
That’s why I want to be transparent. I run Flower Jem alone. If five people ran it, we could share the blame. But if someone says, “Buying pearls from Flower Jem was a mistake,” it feels like a personal rejection. And that really hurts.
So I show both the good and the bad. I also pack everything carefully. When I receive something with boring packaging or no letter, I feel disappointed. That’s why I try to make every package cute and enjoyable to open.
Honestly, I sometimes giggle while packing, thinking, “Why am I going this far?”
When I write all this out, I realize I might be a bit of a handful. Some people probably don’t care about packaging or letters.
But I’m genuinely moved when someone writes me a letter by hand. That’s why I always include one. If it helps the customer feel just a little more joy when they receive their pearl, then it’s worth it. Maybe that’s selfish of me.
Anyway—what I meant to say is: I created a coupon you can use if you subscribe to my newsletter.
Sometimes you’ll get strange reflections like this. Other times, you’ll receive more informative posts about pearls. If you subscribe, you’ll be notified whenever I post something new. Please don’t think of it as spam!
Actually, a few customers have asked for email updates. One was especially persistent last October. I thought the registration form had been available this whole time, but it turns out the page had disappeared—and I hadn’t noticed.
So I’ve set up a new system. You’ll now find the subscription form at the bottom of the Flower Jem homepage.
Once you register, you’ll receive a coupon code for 30% off. And yes, you can use it as many times as you like.
But this coupon isn’t an apology for bothering you with long posts.
On Etsy, I’m required to use Payoneer for transactions, and both Etsy and Payoneer take significant fees. By guiding purchases to my website, I can avoid those fees—and offer you that 30% discount instead.
Etsy offers trust and peace of mind. My own website doesn’t yet have that reputation. But over the past two years, some visitors have returned again and again. That gives me hope that trust is slowly building.
So, from my perspective, it’s a choice: give Etsy 30%, or pass those savings on to you. If you’re willing to take a leap of faith by ordering from my own site, I want to thank you with that 30%.
This system wasn’t easy to set up. I struggled a lot. At first, I wanted to shout about it on Instagram and YouTube. But then I thought—offering 30% for signing up isn’t anything new. It’s as ordinary as getting a drink coupon when you buy bread at a convenience store.
Still, to me, it feels like a personal revolution. But I try to keep perspective.
Even the most beautiful pearls are meaningless to those who aren’t interested in them.
That’s why I decided to keep this announcement quiet—just here in this post. If you’re reading this, I can guess you’re kind, curious, and thoughtful. You’re probably smiling now—but I mean it sincerely.
This blog is a safe space where I feel comfortable sharing news like this.
Still, writing a properly structured piece is difficult. My one skill is writing endlessly—but I tend to wander off-topic.
This morning, a customer told me, “You should write more—your words are interesting.” It was just a short message I’d sent, so I’m not sure what exactly they found amusing, but it made me happy.
I won’t get cocky or start writing pretentious pieces, but over the next few years, I do hope to write in a clearer, more organized way.
Pearls don’t have a universal standard of beauty. I’ve been involved in Akoya pearl farming, processing, and sales for about ten years now. The way pearl farmers see pearls is fascinating. They know pearls so well—but they’re unfamiliar with retail. So when they see dull-looking pearls in a store, they often blurt out, “Why are they selling that?”
Their eye is sharp—but also incomplete.
They’ll see a perfectly round pearl and say, “Yes, but the nacre is too thin.” Or they’ll glance at a pearl and mutter, “Bad nucleus placement,” or “This oyster wasn’t well cared for.” The things they say are hyper-specific, but I want to write about them—about their daily lives, their feelings, their philosophy of pearl farming.
Some customers will say, “Just give me a good pearl at a fair price. I don’t care about the backstory.”
But others may think, “I want to know the journey this pearl took.”
We live in an age of convenience and mass consumption. News floods in and melts away by the next day. In such a fast-paced world, I hope pearls can offer a small, quiet accent to someone’s life.
When you stop to look at a pearl and think, “How beautiful,” I believe time momentarily pauses. Whether you’re absorbed in something or in a calm, zen-like state, time begins to slow down.
My ultimate goal is to share that stillness.
In that fleeting moment when you gaze at a pearl, I hope you sense the sea it came from, the oyster that bore it, the people who cared for it, and the long journey that brought it to you.
Maybe that’s asking too much. But even just a hint of that backstory—I want you to feel it.
So yes, I said a lot in this post.
But what I wanted to say is: Please consider subscribing to the newsletter.
And thank you for reading this far.
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