The Mikimoto Yaguruma is a transformable jewellery piece produced by K. Mikimoto & Co. and exhibited at the 1937 Paris Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne. Conceived in the form of a yaguruma, the eight-spoked arrow-wheel motif drawn from the Japanese decorative tradition, it was designed to be worn as an obi-dome, the ornamental clasp on a kimono sash, but to disassemble into a series of smaller wearable elements including brooches, pendants, hair ornaments, rings, and a tiara. The piece is now held in the Mikimoto Pearl Island Museum at Toba in Mie Prefecture and is one of the principal exposition objects by which the company introduced cultured pearl craft to Western audiences in the inter-war period.

Design concept

The yaguruma motif itself is drawn from the heraldic and decorative repertoire of Edo-period Japan, where it appears as a family crest and as a stylised wheel in textile patterns and lacquer work. Mikimoto's reinterpretation of the motif as a kinetic jewellery piece exploited the radial structure of the arrow-wheel to produce twelve separately wearable configurations from a single base, with each spoke and each set of central elements detachable and remountable in different combinations. The conceit, that one object could become twelve, was a deliberate technical and rhetorical demonstration: technically, of the precision metalsmithing that Mikimoto's workshops could command; rhetorically, of the cultural depth and craft sophistication that Japanese makers brought to the new cultured pearl product.

Materials and construction

The piece is set in platinum and gold and uses several hundred Akoya cultured pearls together with diamonds. Pearl sizes are graduated through the design, with smaller pearls clustered along the spokes and larger feature pearls at the centre of the wheel and at the principal pendants. Diamonds are used as articulating elements at the joints of the transformable structure and as accenting stones in the centrepieces. The mechanical work, which permits the spokes to be removed and the central elements to be reconfigured, is executed in the precision tradition of Mikimoto's Tokyo workshop and remains in functional condition almost a century after manufacture.

Exposition context

The Yaguruma was a centrepiece of Mikimoto's display at the 1937 Paris Exposition, alongside the Pearl Crown and supporting jewellery. The 1937 fair was a key moment in the wider Mikimoto strategy of using international expositions to consolidate the legal and cultural acceptance of cultured pearls in Western markets, a strategy that began with the Pearl Pagoda of 1926 and continued with the Pearl Castle and Pearl Liberty Bell of 1939. The Yaguruma in particular represented the most sophisticated marriage in that sequence between Japanese decorative tradition and European-influenced fine jewellery technique, and it served notice to Place Vendôme that the new Japanese house was capable of work of comparable ambition.

Subsequent history

After the close of the 1937 fair the Yaguruma returned to Japan and entered the Mikimoto company collection. It is now held at the Mikimoto Pearl Island Museum at Toba, where it is exhibited as part of the standing display of the company's exposition pieces. The transformable mechanism remains operable, and the piece is occasionally demonstrated in its various configurations for visiting researchers and on special exhibition occasions. It has not been remounted or sold and is regarded by the company as part of its permanent heritage collection.

Trade and historical significance

For students of twentieth-century jewellery the Yaguruma is significant on two grounds. As an example of transformable jewellery it stands alongside the principal European examples of the form, including the multi-element tiaras of Cartier and Boucheron, but draws its underlying design vocabulary from the Japanese decorative tradition rather than from European heraldry. As an example of cultured pearl craft it demonstrates that within forty years of Kokichi Mikimoto's first spherical cultured pearl in 1905 the Japanese industry was capable of producing pearls in the volume and quality required for an object of this scale and complexity. The piece is therefore both a technical and a cultural document, and one that no serious survey of pre-war Japanese fine jewellery can omit.