I was a college sophomore at Ole Miss, with a 2.0 GPA and a father threatening to bring me home…I was down and out. I had seen the best of what American collegiate life could offer.  I was in a fraternity; I went to parties where lusty daddy’s girls and poseur bravados congregated drunkenly swaying to musical beats. Somehow in that murky stupor, I realized that the “mystique” of American collegiate life was perhaps the greatest marketing ploy of the modern era.  No one tells you that college is finite. Four years later you’re on mom & dad’s couch holding a piece of paper pondering “am I a professional?” I needed momentum. I needed something different that would stir the muses, delivering me from this hedonistic limbo.

Personally, different was studying Japanese. People still ask me “why Japanese?” The truth is I started studying Japanese out of pure impulse.  However, I soon learned that this endeavor was unfitting for the stereotypical college slacker in need of ambition.  What I had not anticipated was the utterly unexpected—I became hooked. Second language acquisition appealed to my pragmatic nature, ultimately guiding me across the vast blue void.

I crossed the Pacific seeking higher language instruction at Nanzan University, a pleasantly secular Roman Catholic university in Nagoya, Japan.   Initially, living in Japan was a warped social experiment.  To begin with, the Japanese have meticulously defined “how to be Japanese,” a dogma that permeates even mundane tasks such as unfurling your umbrella, folding papers and yes, sitting.  I was no longer in Oxford, Mississippi where red Dixie cups were fashionable.  I rode the city subways, where people’s gazes poured onto the anomaly, a splotch of brown hair in a serpentine hallway filled with jet-black heads.

Three months into my stay I’d lost 20-lbs causing my battered jeans to drag as I shuffled, I was shaggy headed and needed a friend. I was frequenting greasy spoons and down town bars field-testing my Japanese.  In Nagoya’s downtown district of “Sakae” I enjoyed stopping by an Irish pub named “Pete’s,” where even cheap bourbon was served like scotch. One night waiting in the line for the bathroom, I had the choice of speaking to a Ziggy Star Dust wannabe “m’urse toter” or a 40-something year old guy I recognized from my gym.  The choice was obvious.

It was then that I had met the man who would become my mentor, greatest language instructor and future boss, Masato.  Masato was great company for an amateur Japanese speaker; he liked the NFL especially the Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders, constantly listened to American 80’s rock-and-roll and gave me the nitty-gritty on the local color.   From the get-go he started training me on “how to be Japanese.” Anyone who is familiar with the Japanese knows them to be a virtuous people, however lacking outspoken sincerity. Masato and I became as thick as thieves, partying like rock stars, hitting on 20-year-olds in short skirts; we were running amuck in a metropolis approximately twice the size of Houston, Texas.  During this time Masato, a Japanese cultured pearl wholesaler, would feed me tidbits about his work over our regular diet of spirits and cheap sashimi.

After two years of being in the limelight of Japan, I couldn’t go back to Mississippi, so I pleaded Masato to allow me to work for him post graduation.  While I was learning Japanese, I could peddle pearls. Masato agreed. I learned pearls are a truly international gem stone hailing from all corners of the Pacific.

After two years plus in Japan I became a legally fluent Japanese speaker; I was schmoozing with clients solo and sorting through hundreds of pearl necklaces a month. My studies shifted toward the cultured pearl industry and I was hooked again.  Soon, I became shrewdly aware that despite the glaring differences between each pearl house’s culturing and refining techniques, and quality standards, the end consumer knows very little about the product they are purchasing.  I was even more horrified when I learned most Americans were paying thousands of dollars on dyed pearls. How could this be?

Mission accepted.  I wanted to offer American consumers the “best pearls” of what Japan had to offer.  Following extensive research Masato and I partnered with select pearl farmers of Japan’s Mie prefecture.  Mie is Japan’s nirvana of delectable seafood cuisine, azure Pacific waters and jungle greenery.  Needless to say it was love at first sight.   In Mie, Masato and I found Japanese pearl farmers capable of producing pearls completely free of pigment-altering chemicals.  Additionally these pearls were of the top 2-3% quality of all cultured Japanese akoya pearls.

In honor of my mentor, my closest friends in America and I created our own pearl jewelry brand MASATO.

Now I am writing this blog to inform American consumers about the cultured pearl industry.

Welcome,

Matt Colpitts, COO