Comments are back! Please feel free to share your thoughts and criticisms! Also the anime will be starting soon! Also this is embarra.s.singly late, but a big thanks to the person who gave me a kofi! It"s my first time getting one so I was really surprised lol
“This is very good. Are you the apprentice?”
“No, I"m just a regular part-timer.”
“Is that so.”
This is very delicious, thank you, Onodersan said, smiling. I bowed my head.
“In the past, a landowner named Hamadsan ran a coffee shop here. Because this is a business district, n.o.body stayed in stores for very long, but the owner was a good person, and the place became a favorite. Whenever my wife and I visited Ginza, we generally came here or Shiseido Parlour.* Are you here because you like jewels?”
(TN: Shiseido Parlour is a chain of fancy dessert places that began in Ginza, started by Shiseido Pharmacy that would later become the cosmestics company.)
“Something like that…But, I am still very much…learning about all the details.”
“I see.”
That is a good thing, Onodersan nodded. It didn"t look like he was going to explain the reason for the impurities on the diamond.
Onodersan, looking for something to do, told me about his work. Apparently, he was the president of a machine manufacturing company. Not big machines, but components for precision equipment. He told me that his company and home were together, and after a meeting in his working area on the first floor, he could sleep in his bedroom on the second floor thirty minutes later. He wasn"t a pretentious person.
When Richard returned, he showed him three pamphlets and introduced him to redesigns for brooches, cufflinks, and tie pins. The metal of the ring could also be melted down and reused. Onodersan seemed interested in the tie pins, but he didn"t seem to like any of the designs in the pamphlet.
After I refilled royal milk tea for the two of them, Richard suggested that Onodersan could have it custom made. There was a designer in Kyoto he knew intimately. He could have that person draw a design and create a tie pin that was the only one in the world. Onodersan asked about their skill, and Richard a.s.sured him that they did a very thorough and delicate job.
You may ask another place if you do not like it, so if you do not mind that…After being informed of that, Onodersan ordered a design. The price was not cheap, but he could do deferred payments, and he would be able to get the design proposal in two weeks.
Richard took the measurements of the diamond with a fine measuring tape, took pictures of the ring from all angles with a digital camera, then carefully returned the dull diamond to Onodersan. Before he closed the lid of the box with a snap, Onodersan stared fixedly at the gem. What was it? His eyes looked like they were talking to it.
Before he left the store, he once again politely thanked me for the tea.
Nevertheless, the fact that I was able to see a diamond on the day Tanimoto-san told me about them. It appeared that my “insane luck” Richard talked about was nothing to sneeze at.
“That stone was really something. Why did it turn so dark?”
“A fire, perhaps. Judging from appearances, that was from soot and smoke.”
“So you"re saying it was a burnt diamond. Huh? Wait a minute, diamonds are—”
“Carbon.”
As expected, it was that. While putting the empty cups on a tray, I looked back at Richard. Charcoal was weak against fire.*
(TN: In case you didn"t know, charcoal is made of carbon. In j.a.panese, carbon and charcoal both contain the kanji 炭, which means charcoal.)
“…By charcoal, you mean that charcoal, right. Doesn"t it immediately burn when it"s on fire?”
“It depends on the temperature of the fire. Chalk, charcoal, and diamonds differ in the strength of the bonding between their carbon molecules. It is said that diamonds begin to burn at above six hundred degrees, and when it is over one thousand degrees, they soften, but if it is a temperature below that, they will remain even if they become unrecoverable.”
“Then, can the impurities…be cleaned?”
“They can.”
“That"s amazing! How?”
“Neutral detergent.”
With my eyes wide, I pointed towards the kitchen, and Richard nodded.
“There are special liquids, but the ingredients are almost the same. Even a stone that isn"t in such a bad condition can become so beautiful that you can hardly recognize it, if you occasionally polish it.”
“Then, shouldn"t we have offered to polish it here, like the usual cleaning? We could have cleaned it immediately.”
“He ordered a redesign, but we have not touched on the gem"s impurities at all. In the first place, if you research information about redesigning, you will know things like how to clean a diamond"s impurities immediately. I do not believe he did not know.”
“…In other words?”
“It is easy to polish a stone, but you cannot return it to the way it was.”
Did that mean there was special circ.u.mstances for why diamond was kept dark?
Why still? In the first place, didn"t gems have value because they were pretty?
I was confused, but I decided to switch the direction of my thoughts. There was no use thinking about it. What I learned the most in this store was that everyone"s situation was different, and that I couldn"t understand the whole picture at all just by having glimpses at parts of it. The possessor of jewel-like eyes seemed like an expert at inferring the whole story from a single part, but I was just a plain old part-timer.
“By the way, this is my first time seeing a diamond that big in this store. I thought we only dealt in colored stones. Do we not deal with them a lot?”
“It is nothing like that. Though, certainly, there are not just dealers who sell both colored stones and diamonds. It seems that you have become a little more familiar with stones.”
“Ah, well…”
It wasn"t freely, but it looked like I was praised. Since it was a good time, I tried to confide my most recent worries. Gems were beautiful. They were beautiful, so they were expensive. But I was feeling gloomy because I didn"t understand the reason for the expensiveness. I couldn"t call it overcharging, but for me, who lived in a world where chicken drumettes were sixty-six yen for a hundred grams, there were too many things I didn"t get.
“It feels wrong to ask you this, but why are gems so expensive…?”
Richard let out a short “hmph” through his nose and invited me over to a sofa. This might be the first time I sat on a sofa next to him. No, maybe since the Shin-Kobe train?
“The reason why gems are expensive, is it? Do you mean that you want to know the processing and labour costs of digging out gemstones, processing them, and putting them on a distribution route?”
“No…”
I understood that they were expensive in proportion to the time and labour spent on them. Anything would be. But, in the first place, why did we think about putting in all that time and effort and make a stone a “precious stone”?
“This is just an example, but a.s.sume that I want to make money from diamonds. How can I put diamonds up for sale and make a profit? This is also business, but it"s probably a lot different from managing a company.”
“Why are you so fixated on diamonds?”
“Tani…my friend said that the diamond is an interesting stone, so I"m curious about them even though I don"t really get it. Like ‘value" and stuff like that…”
Indeed, Richard nodded. It seemed that he understood the meaning of Tanimoto-san"s words. What did she mean? If it was in terms of being products for sale, then weren"t diamonds and sapphires all the same thing?
“In the latter half of the nineteenth century, there was a man who thought something similar as you.”
“Nineteenth century?”
“That was when a large diamond mine was discovered in southern Africa. Up till then, diamonds were only one of the many stones primarily yielded from India and were loved by the privileged cla.s.s in Western countries, but the tide has changed since then. You are studying economics, yes? What happens if a large amount of currency suddenly appears on the market?”
“That"d be…inflation. The currency value goes down.”
The ones troubled by too many diamonds appearing would be the gem dealers selling diamonds. If supply exceeded demand and they weren"t cheap, they would not sell. A price reduction battle would happen. In the end, there will be absolutely no profit made at all. When I checked with him to see if that was what he meant, Richard nodded and said, “Precisely.”
“In order to sell something with a surplus at the same price as before, you have to open up new markets. However, for the people at the time, diamonds and sapphires were all the same, strange stones they were not familiar with. If I were to use a simile, it would be like they were asked to launch into s.p.a.ce. What would you do if you had to set sail into the sea of stars and do business with aliens?”
“aliens?”
“Do you think they would want diamonds? Not rubies, sapphires, or emeralds, but diamonds.”
It sounded like something out of science fiction. A jeweler wearing a s.p.a.cesuit and selling rings. Speaking of which, in my economics cla.s.s, I was pretty sure that my professor used a similar allegory before. How it was very difficult to sell a new product.
“…I think it would be hard. I don"t think aliens want diamonds. They don"t understand their value. They aren"t everyday items like food or clothes, I think they would say, ‘What"s so good about them?" Even if there were aliens who wanted sparkly stones, if there were other stones, they might buy those. Whether you like sapphires or diamonds, and which one of them you want, is completely a problem of personal preference, I think.”
“Precisely. And that is why he devised a perfect plan.”
“Perfect plan…?”
“The creation of ‘value."”
What Richard said after that was beyond my imagination.
The multimillionaire who owned the diamond mine planned on controlling everything about diamonds. There were two plans, Richard said, holding up two fingers.
The first one was the monopolization of the path from yield to sales. Securing the path. He bought out the other diamond mines in succession and singlehandedly seized the distribution of diamonds mined in the world. It was like seizing a water source. He could sell stones wholesale at whatever time and price he wanted. Even among feats of strength, it was too much.
The second one was to make an appeal to the people who never had a connection to gems for all their lives about the magnificence of diamonds. In short, it was an image tactic.
The hardest substance in the world. A pure stone composed of a single element. A gem that emitted a rainbow-colored brilliance. A girl"s best friend. That large scale advertising in newspapers and television was said to be the most successful catchphrase in the world, and literally emitted an “eternal brilliance.”
It was a simple strategy, but the methods were thorough.
Somehow, nonchalantly, the value of diamonds had snuck into even people who weren"t interested in jewels. Diamonds were perfect for life"s important scenarios. Not sapphires, rubies, or emeralds—it had to be diamonds. Commercials, songs, movies. A treasured ring was given by the mother to her daughter. It was unthinkable to sell it to a second-hand dealer.
“…Then…diamonds being expensive is…”
“They are the result of perfect ‘value." Of course, this is the twenty-first century, not the nineteenth century, so complete control is impossible, but even so, you know that large companies that deal in diamonds would not think of going out of their way to ruin and lower the value of their own goods. Even now, the world of diamonds operate just as how someone in the nineteenth century planned.”
Some tea, Richard prompted. I staggered towards the kitchen and found myself heating up a pot without putting anything in it, completely thrown off balance.
What exactly was the stone called “diamond”?
Being expensive because there was a demand because they were beautiful, was it all just a front? a.s.suming that even the value that became a basic a.s.sumption was created by the seller, did that mean everything started with a profitable scheme in the first place?
When Tanimoto-san said I should research diamonds, did she mean about this?
Richard blew on the royal milk tea I made before drinking it. I, who didn"t realize I had forgot to put in ice, fainted in agony at the unexpected heat and ran back to the kitchen to drink water. When I returned to reception room, there was a deep wrinkle between Richard"s brows.
“This is bad manners.”
“…Sorry…say, was all the talk before really true?”
“If you cannot trust me, why are you asking me that question?”
“That"s not what I mean.”
Because it was such an outrageous conversation, I felt like I was being blinded by light.
I sat down on the sofa again, and Richard seemed to have taken that as the beginning of the second round. He began talking about the criteria for determining the “beauty” of a diamond.
“The guarantee letter for a diamond is called an ‘appraisal doc.u.ment," and for all other gems, it is called an ‘evaluation doc.u.ment." I believe I have told you about that before, but do you know the reason for why that is?”*
(TN: I think this is strictly a j.a.panese thing because as far as I know, in English appraisal is used for all gems, not just diamonds.)
“…I"m curious about it, but I don"t know.”
“It is because their contents are completely different. An evaluation doc.u.ment is a doc.u.ment that guarantees the type of stone, saying something like ‘This stone is an emerald, not a garnet or jade." In human terms, it is similar to records of your birth, height, weight, and surgical history. However, for diamonds, a more unified standard of value than for other stones exist for the same reason, so more detailed doc.u.mentation is distributed. In addition to height and weight, there are facial features, hair color, even a bad skin condition—a more detailed profile a.s.sessed by the diamond"s own criteria. The ‘appraisal doc.u.ment" is written based on these criteria. The main criteria are called the 4 C"s.”
“Sorry, that"s enough. I can"t remember any more than that at once.”
I interjected, and Richard blinked repeatedly. He seemed a bit surprised by the sudden voice. Well, shall we continue it next time? He said, and took another sip of tea. I let out a small sigh.
What was with this vague feeling of desolation, like the night when your mother told you face-to-face that “Santa isn"t real.” Of course you knew that. You somehow knew it before you were told that. But…
“Being able to innocently call a pretty thing ‘pretty" might be the happiest thing. Without thinking about anything like numbers.”
“Do you mean that I, who made this a business, am unhappy?”
“I didn"t say that.”
“Then what else are you saying?”
Richard"s voice was sharp. I felt daunted. It was the first time I heard him sound like that.
“I told you about all of this because I believe you are able to understand the value of a gem in the true sense. It was not to make you give yourself over to pessimism. The reasons for buying gems vary from customer to customer, but what they all have in common is that they love gems and buying them. I also take pride in my work. I think well of your curiosity and purity, but as the store owner, I will be grateful if you could just remember that you are not here for an educational cla.s.s trip.”
Richard put his hand to his chest and bowed beautifully. There was poison mixed in with his sarcastic-sounding wording. I understood. In the first place, I came here to work part-time.
But.
“…Do you feel that way even when you"re not working?”
“Hah?”
“Rather than always being cool, you"re unemotional and dry. You"re like a true gem.”
There was no response. When I returned from cleaning the cups, Richard was about to go into the back room. A short time later, I heard the sounds of typing. He was probably contacting that jewelry designer in Kyoto.
Immediately afterwards, a customer came in to have a garnet hair ornament fixed, and Richard received the customer as I hurried to serve tea. Being busy was good. Without feeling even a bit satisfied with the diamond lecture or what happened afterwards, I finished that day"s work.
There was no point in feeling depressed forever. Seeing was believing. It was easier to do something than to worry about it.
I changed my att.i.tude and decided to visit a department store in Shinjuku. The jewelry section. The reason I didn"t go to Ginza was simply because I read online that there was a large jewelry section here. It was better to see a large number of gems, if anything. It was boring just waiting for Richard to show me each of them one-by-one. A fortune-telling app I inadvertently saw when I was just about to leave told me to “Beware of unexpected meetings! Your encounter luck is terrible”, but if you always worried about stuff like that, you wouldn"t be able to get anything done. It wasn"t the kind of place where I would b.u.mp into someone, and I didn"t really believe it.
I didn"t think my unsatisfied and discontented thoughts would be cleared at once, but at least those who sold jewels in department stores should see diamonds differently than Richard and the current me. I wanted to experience that. To see it.
“Welcome!”
And with that, my modest expectations were shattered within seconds after I began my infiltration of the jewelry section.
First, I was overwhelmed by the atmosphere. The salesperson in a neat uniform, and the gla.s.s showcases. The dazzling lights. And then, there was the diamonds.
Diamonds, diamonds, diamonds. No matter where I turned, there were diamonds. It was a flood of diamonds.
Wait a minute. Why would they only sell stones that were so similar? This wasn"t the jewelry section, it was the diamond section.