Who Are the Ama and Will the Exist in Future Generations?

English

November 2012

Who are the Ama and Will They Exist for Future Generations?

In the book The Sound of Waves Yukio Mishima shows what life is like in a fishing village where female divers called Ama live and work. This diving culture that is portrayed in the book by Mishima has a unique and rich heritage, but thanks to the rapid development of Japan as well as other factors in the last 50 years, this culture will probably not be survive. It is important to look at the history and development of Ama before coming to a conclusion regarding the future of this unique society.

Ama are women within fishing villages who make a living diving in the ocean for abalone. “Abalone are any genus of edible rock-clinging gastropod mollusks that have a flattened slightly spiral in form,” (“Abalone” 2003). These women live in villages scattered throughout the coastline of Japan. These villages are unique in their identities in that the women complement and sometimes equal the men in gathering food from the ocean (Maraini 17). This is not normal in a society where women are thought as subordinates to men. Normally men are the breadwinners. They bring in all the money to buy food or bring home the food itself. In this unique society, women not only participate in bringing food and money home, but also have a niche, in the profession as a diver, where women are better than men.

The establishment of the niche actually came about because of biological differences that exist between a man and a woman. Traditional Ama dove wearing nothing but a black triangle with a black string to cover the female genitalia (Fleming 154). This led to an idealized almost fantasy concerning the Ama. The nudity was not meant to be innuendo, it was just how common people dove at the time. As discussed by Martinez, she describes how tourism became quite a big draw and that the Ama were able to make some money based on this idea of village girls diving into the ocean wearing next to nothing....