Pearl Institute Co., Ltd. offers a best expertise on pearls in Japan and in the world. As pearls are normally not graded by numerical standards such as diamonds, fair grading of pearls requires special skills and attention. Many major pearl cultivators also bring their products to this institute for quality inspection.Their business volume is big, evaluating hundreds and hundreds of strands and loose pearls everyday. Probably it does not exist any institution outside japan whose daily grading volume reaches even one quarter of Pearl Institute'sThey grade pearls in conformity to the Inspection Rules for Exporting Pearls in the former Pearl Cultivation Law.

The president of Pearl Institute, is an excellent expert of pearls, who worked for Mikimoto for 15 years and devoted his career in the pearl industry for more than 40 years before establishing his own institute. In addition to professional pearl evaluation, he often gives lectures at jewelry schools, such as Yamanashi Prefecture Jewelry School, and important jewelry meetings in Japan as well. He consults for magazine or newspaper articles about pearls, and published his book ‘Pearl Cultivation and Processing’.

In its effort to support wholesalers and retailers, Pearl Institute Co., Ltd. also offers wide range of pearl information such as cultivation, treatment process and distribution methods. They also have training programs for jewelry personnel to be informed more about pearls. They do not evaluate price, buy or sell pearls.

Classifying Japanese akoya cultured pearls requires a lot of knowledge and experience together with advanced machinery. Many of the well-known gemological institutions do not provide through aspects to determine value of the pearls. For example, one institution omits luster, the other omits nacre thickness, and other drops matching. Those major gemological institutions grade mainly diamonds and other gems with high experties. We hope they will progress on grading reports of Japanese akoya cultured pearls in the near future.