Departments
海女
AMA
Japan’s female pearl divers have long been a popular attraction at Ise Shima National Park. The divers plunge up to thirty feet below the surface of the Pacific Ocean to retrieve not only pearls, but also abalone and various other kinds of shellfish.
The ama have for centuries been the subject of folklore both inside and outside of Japan. During the Edo Period (Edo Jidai / 江戸時代 / 1603 - 1867), the pearl divers were often portrayed in wood block prints called mokuhan (木版 ). Ama have even made an appearance in a James Bond film. In the the 1967 James Bond film, You Only Live Twice, actress Akiko Wakabayashi played Kissy Suzuki, a pearl diver-turned spy.
The pearl divers became an international tourist attraction in 1893, when Kokichi Mikimoto, the father of the Japanese cultured pearl industry, hired them to dive for pearls at his company’s pearl farm. (Diving is, incidentally, an inefficient way to gather cultured pearls. The divers were hired strictly for show.)
There are also male divers, but the female pearl divers are more numerous. They also receive far more attention—perhaps because they defy the sexist notion that women are inherently “too soft” to perform physically demanding tasks. In fact, some anthropologists who have studied Japan’s pearl divers hypothesize that women are better suited to the work, because their physiology enables them to endure cold underwater temperatures more effectively than men.
Pearl diving is potentially hazardous work, and the women protect themselves from dangers by wearing special amulets. Since they pride themselves on their physical endurance and skills, they eschew full scuba suits, and wear only very thin wetsuits that cover the torso.
