On the train back from Matsusaka, I browsed through some brochures from the local tourist office. In one, on the history of Mie Prefecture, my eye was caught by a strangely haunting sepia photograph of two women dressed from head to foot in white-hooded jumpsuits and wearing goggles. They looked like uncommonly stylish welders, but according to the brief paragraph underneath, these were the fabled female divers, or ama, who have swum in the waters off the easterly Pacific coast of Mie for almost two thousand years.
The next page was about Mikimoto, the first company to cultivate pearls, founded by Kokichi Mikimoto, the son of a noodle maker, in 1899. Mikimoto was based in the city of Toba. Looking at the map on the back of the brochure, I saw that Toba and Suga-jima, two of the main areas for ama divers, were about an hour’s drive from each other.
Drawing on a decade of professional experience, I did what all journalists do when presented with two small snippets of possibly related information: I fashioned them into a dramatic story. By the time I arrived back at the house in Kyoto, I was able to tell Lissen and the boys heroic tales of female divers who dressed in white to scare killer sharks and could hold their breath for half an hour while diving for pearls worth as much as a house.
The next day, I contacted the Mie tourist board to find out more. Were any of the lady pearl divers still alive? Yes, absolutely, but they didn’t dive for pearls, the tourist board official told me. All the pearls produced in the region were farmed. Of course, if I had thought about it for a moment, I would have realized that you don’t need to dive for cultivated pearls—that’s the whole point of cultivating them. The ama divers dive instead for abalone, scallops, sea cucumbers, seaweed, and sea urchins. Was there any chance I could meet them? I asked. No problem, she said. How about tomorrow?
So the day after that—by now, we were into early October—we caught the train to Toba. We were met at the station by two representatives of the tourist board, who whisked us off on a spectacularly scenic minibus ride around Ago Bay to the village of Osatsu, where most of the ama divers live.
We drove along precipitous roads through forested hills high above a cobalt sea dotted with rocky islets. In the West, the only images we tend to get of Japan are overwhelmingly urban, but this was a potent reminder that once you break free of the concrete and the malls, Japan has natural beauty to match anywhere in the world.
We came to a ramshackle fishing village on a horseshoe bay and parked on the beach. A narrow path hugging the side of the cliffs led, above crashing waves below, to a small hut a couple of hundred yards away at the mouth of the bay. Here, we were told, our lunch would be prepared. As we walked farther out toward the ocean, we started to hear an eerie whistling noise. Then, as we arrived at a wooden hut at the end of the path, two figures emerged up a ladder from the sea to meet us.
And there they were, the sepia-toned ladies brought to life: two real-life ama divers, Tamie Kosaki and Kayo Kosaki, sisters in their early forties. They were carrying wooden tubs in which were a handful of intriguing shellfish.
They showed us into the wooden shack where an open fire—or robata—had already burned down to hot ash in the middle of the floor. We sat around it as the women grilled their catch—sea snails and scallops, as well as some pre-bought squid and clams—and began to unravel the story of the ama divers.
Thirty years ago there were four hundred divers living in Osatsu alone, they said, but the numbers were declining everywhere, and now there were only three thousand in the entire region. There were two types of ama divers: those who swam out from the shore and fished around thirty feet from the beach, and those—usually husband-and-wife couples—who sailed farther out, around a hundred feet, to dive. Both types of divers are highly respected in the community, like village elders.
The women dive almost every day for about an hour at a time, while their husbands stay on the boat. I made some lame joke about marital relations at this point, but apparently women have always been the divers in these parts because the locals believe their extra body fat means they are better insulated to dive into deeper, colder waters, and—slightly less plausibly—that they have larger lungs and so can hold their breath longer.
“We use about ten kilos [twenty-two pounds] of weights to go down, and as we are pulled back up, we whistle to control our breathing. If we breathe too fast, it is dangerous,” said Tamie. They demonstrated. It was the eerie, breathy whistling sound we had heard as we arrived, deeply evocative for the Japanese, apparently.
“We start usually at around twenty years old, but the oldest ama is eighty-one, and she is still diving. We dive for shellfish but also seaweed; it depends on the time of year. In March we dive for seaweed; now the number one thing is sea cucumber.”
What was their most prized catch? “Abalone, but it is so difficult,” said her sister. “They stick to the rocks very firmly, and it takes time to get them off. We don’t have much time because we hold our breath.”
“How long can you hold your breath?” asked Asger, who had been practicing his own breath-holding on the train ride there. “I can do it this long.” He puffed out his cheeks and began to turn pink, exhaling dramatically after about ten seconds.
“About a minute and a half,” Tamie said, laughing. “Of course, if we are still, we can hold it much longer, but we have to use a lot of energy swimming around on the seabed looking for the shells.”
I could understand why ama divers hadn’t used oxygen in the past, when the technology hadn’t existed, but why didn’t they use it now? “Today, we have to be careful about overfishing,” said Kayo. “Without oxygen, it limits how long we can search for the shellfish, so we don’t catch so much. We have to check their size with this [she held up a forceps-style measure] so that we don’t catch the young ones.”
Lissen asked about the white suits. Were they really originally worn to frighten off sharks? “No, it is more to protect against jellyfish and sunburn. We do see sharks, though, about one meter [three feet] long, but they are not dangerous. What we do is dangerous, though. Last year one diver was hospitalized when she got trapped in the rope. We wear this symbol.” She pointed at a star-shaped badge. “It is our lucky charm.”
As Kayo spoke, she turned one of the sazae, sea snail, on the grill. Its juices spat across the hut. Asger and Emil looked on with horror and fascination, recoiling with wide eyes when offered one on the end of a fork.
As the guest of honor, I didn’t have the privilege of refusal, even though my experience of snails is of a great deal of chewing with not much flavor by way of reward. I once visited a snail farm on a Finnish island. The woman running it explained that before you eat snails you have to starve them so they—and there is no delicate way of putting this—expel all their waste matter. These snails, though not the same species, had clearly not undergone this purging, having just been wrenched from the sea, which probably explained the bitter aftertaste from their dark green intestine.
Was this one of their favorite dishes? “Oh no.” They both shook their heads. “Uni [sea urchin] with rice. Very simple: rice with lots of rice vinegar and seaweed and vegetables with uni on top.”
Back in Toba, we had some time to kill before catching our train to Kyoto. As the home of Mikimoto, Toba is famous for its pearls. The surface of its beautiful rocky bay is covered with the wooden rafts used to suspend the oysters that grow the pearls. In the middle of it all is Pearl Island, a theme park built by the mighty Mikimoto company. Inside, lavish exhibits explain how pearls are cultivated within the shells of Akoya oysters: “A portion of the internal organs is parted with a spatula, and a small incision is made in the surface of the body of the oyster with a scalpel. Then, very gently, a path is made through the incisors into the gonads.” Something to think about the next time you reach for something to accessorize that twinset.