Japan’s sea lions

Anti-stereotypical professions: Ama-San and Haenyo ─ apnoea divers in Japan and Korea

Headlines from Japan con­cer­ning the world of work usually surprise us with tech­no­lo­gi­cal inno­va­tions such as the recent testing of care robots. The special rela­ti­ons­hip of the Japanese to tra­di­tio­nal pro­fes­si­ons, on the other hand, is often relegated to museum curio­si­ties. Por­tu­gue­se filmmaker Cláudia Varejão has created a cinematic monument in this sense with Ama-San (“sea women”) for the disap­pearing Japanese apnoea divers. The Korean coun­ter­part to this is the Haenyo (“sea women”), who right­ful­ly made it onto the UNESCO list of imma­te­ri­al world cultural heritage. Women who have been diving together for genera­ti­ons for shellfish, crustace­ans and shells to support their families.

From a Western point of view, this occup­a­tio­nal group is quite excep­tio­nal. It consists almost exclu­si­ve­ly of women who are engaged in an activity that for thousands of years in the rest of the world was reserved for men. These women have promoted female entre­pre­neurs­hip, female employ­ment and eman­ci­pa­ti­on in an extremely patri­ar­chal society, for example by orga­ni­sing them­sel­ves into trade unions. Female apnoea divers today have an average age of over 60 years, in a job that is generally clas­si­fied as hard work. And asto­nis­hin­gly, until the advent of Western tourism in the 1950s, they were doing their job naked. Admit­ted­ly, before the invention of wetsuits, this cha­rac­te­ris­tic had mainly practical reasons. Espe­cial­ly the latter aspect of this pro­fes­si­on was of interest to many Western hobby eth­no­graph­ers, which, by the way, was aes­the­ti­cal­ly excel­lent­ly docu­men­ted by the nude pho­to­gra­pher Yoshiyuki Iwasewe (1904 — 2001). It may be assumed that it is precisely for this reason that early film record­ings of this sup­po­sed­ly exotic and seemingly erotic pro­fes­si­on exist.

The film by Varejão accom­pa­nies the everyday life of three — at least up to the neck in neoprene — divers of different genera­ti­ons in the style of ‘Direct Cinema’. Varejão herself appro­pria­te­ly calls her film “eth­no­fic­tion”.

Refe­ren­ces:
Luke, Anthony (2011). Pho­to­gra­pher Iwase Yoshi­yu­ki’s Ama Divers
Suzuki, Krys (2019). Ama-San: The Culture and History of Japan’s Female Free Divers