Ama divers

                   The Ama divers

One of the lesser-known but fascinating parts of Japanese culture is that of the Ama pearl divers. Ama are Japanese divers, famous for collecting pearls. The majority of ama are women.Ama means "sea woman". Japanese tradition holds that the practice of ama may be 2,000 years old. Traditionally, and even as recently as the 1960s, ama dived wearing only a loincloth. Even in modern times, ama dive without scuba gear or air tanks, making them a traditional sort of free-diver. Depending on the region, ama may dive with masks, fins, and torso-covering wet suits at the most. Only divers who work for tourist attractions use white, partially transparent suits. Ama are famous for pearl diving, but originally they dived for food like seaweed, shellfish, lobsters, octopus, and sea urchins — and oysters which sometimes have pearls. Ama can keep diving well into old age. The older divers are generally able to stay submerged longer than the younger. Usually they also have another job, typically working on a farm. Some Japanese people believe that the majority of ama are women because of how their bodies differ from men: The fat on a female body is distributed differently from on men.  The role of the Mikimoto ama was to collect the oysters from the seabed so that the pearl-producing nucleus may be inserted. Once this critical process was completed, the ama then carefully returned the oysters to the seabed – in a place where they were protected from external dangers (such as typhoons and red tide). In order to successfully complete this process, each diver would have to hold her breath for up to two minutes at a time in often freezing cold waters. Upon surfacing, the ama opened their mouths slightly and exhaled slowly, making a whistling sound known as ‘Isobue’. While traditional ama divers wore only a fundoshi (loincloth) to make it easier to move in the water and a tenugui (bandanna) around their head to cover their hair, Mikimoto ama wore a full white diving costume and used a wooden barrel as a buoy. They were connected to this buoy by a rope and would use it to rest and catch their breath between dives.With lack of young women to succeed their elders and modernisation of Japan’s fisheries however, this ancient practice is dwindling. Numbers have dropped to just 1/8th of what they once were. In 1956 there were 17,611 Ama in Japan but as of 2010 only 2,174 remained. Of those, 973 (nearly half) work in either Toba or Shima city, Mie prefecture. The tourism industry at Mikimoto Pearl is vital in preserving the memory of the Ama divers, even if it’s not as romanticised as the traditional Amas, but the tide could change for the small coastal villages whose age-old fishing traditions and Ama heritage could soon be a thing of the past.