Notas del episodio
For roughly 2,000 years, the ama, or sea women, of Japan have freedived into cold coastal water on a single breath. Hard records place them in the Heian period, when they gathered seaweed, shellfish, sea urchins, and above all abalone, which was presented as a sacred offering to emperors and major shrines. They worked without goggles until the late 19th or early 20th century, finding their catch by touch, and they lost weight every season to the cold. Surfacing, each diver released her breath in a long whistle called the isobue, a controlled exhale that protected her lungs and became the sound of the Japanese coast. Japanese tradition held that women made better divers because of a thicker layer of body fat that delayed hypothermia. They dove in loincloths in some regions until the 1960s, later in white uniforms linked to purity and believed to ward off sharks, and they embroidered their head scarves with a star drawn in one continuous line, the seiman, and a lattice charm, the doman.
Everything changed in 1893, when Mikimoto Kokichi produced a cultured pearl. Pearl farming needed divers who could move and clean oyster baskets on the seafloor, so Mikimoto hired the ama at Mikimoto Pearl Island in Toba, where tourists watched them from observation decks. Fame followed: the 1958 documentary Ama Girls, the sensational 1963 film Violated Paradise, the Bond character Kissy Suzuki in You Only Live Twice, and later the NHK drama Amachan and the series Amanchu. The pearl trade kept the practice alive but put it on display. Around 6,000 ama worked in the 1940s. Today perhaps 60 or 70 remain, with no young women taking up the training that once began at age 12 or 13.
- The isobue whistle prevents a sudden gasp that could cause hyperventilation or uneven pressure equalization.
- The seiman star returns to its starting point, a charm for coming back safely from every dive.
- Hokusai's 1814 woodblock print The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife depicts a young ama with two octopuses.
- Divers visited small coastal shrines after each day's work to give thanks for a safe return.
- Some active ama are still diving in their 70s and even their 90s.