Toba, Japan Hotels, Vacations, Tourism

Although it's on an attractive bay, the town of TOBA is not somewhere to linger. The seafront is a strip of car parks, ferry terminals and shopping arcades, behind which run the main road and train tracks. Really the only point in stopping here, unless you need accommodation or are catching a ferry, is to pay homage to the birthplace of cultured pearls. In 1893 Mikimoto Kokichi (1858–1954), the son of a Toba noodle-maker, produced the world's first cultivated pearl using tools developed by a dentist friend. Just six years later he opened his first shop in Tokyo's fashionable Ginza shopping … more »