One of my collegues passed on a small journal called Pearl World to me.  In it is an article written several years ago by C. Denise George that questions whether Tatsuhei Mise and Tokichi Nishikawa, the two Japanese who are credited with developing the technique of cultivating akoya pearl oysters really came up with the method themselves or whether they “stole” the method from an Australian, William Saville-Kent while on Thursday Island off the coast of Australia.

The article was interesting to me because I’m attracted to things that show coincidences and raise questions.  I read it like a good story and think, well that was fun.

But there is another part of me, the same part that can’t relate to this human urge to be the first to climb a mountain to be a first to make a scientific discovery. Is there some fundamental gene missing in me? This drive to be first at something, recognized for something? It seems to be an innate part of human nature. Yet I’ve always felt that ideas are not, cannot, be exclusive property. Ideas are like wind. If I have one here in California, no doubt someone else will have the same idea somewhere in Latvia. It just seems to work that way.

But, then, maybe I can relate. One time an editor told me I had a great idea for a story–a piece on a place I’d visited, interviewed people, taken pictures for, but she wanted a better known writer to do the story so suggested I turn all my research over to him so he could do it instead. So much for my Zen mind.

It’s not the same as being first but I wasn’t about to let someone else do a story that I had already done all the leg work for.

So is that what happened with two Japanese men in the early 1900s?