And there has been a human toll: more than half of the pearl farmers in Masaki have been forced out of business since 1988.

CNN: ASIANOW - TIME Asia

The small island of Masaki in central Japan's Ago Bay was once called Treasure Island because of the riches pearl cultivation brought to its residents.

CNN: ASIANOW - TIME Asia

"Toggle DDR provides a faster interface than conventional NAND using an asynchronous design, delivering the benefits of high-speed data transfer to a wider market, such as for solid state drive (SSD) applications including enterprise storage, mobile phones, multimedia terminals and consumer products, " said Masaki Momodomi, Technical Executive, Memory product, Toshiba Corporation.

ENGADGET: Samsung and Toshiba double-down on 400Mbps DDR 2.0 NAND flash memory standard