Some six thousand miles from her home, a young girl of 15 prepared for her first show in the newly opened San Diego SeaWorld. Wearing the traditional white diving dress of her home village in the Kii Peninsula region on Japan’s main island of Honshu, she plunged into a deep pool in the ‘Japanese Village’, collected an oyster from the bottom, and rose to thunderous applause.
That was in 1964. Most Americans and Western tourists had never seen anyone quite like Kimiyo Hayashi. Her ability to dive to great depths without scuba equipment was remarkable, a skill passed down to her from her mother and grandmother, and generations of women before that.
Hayashi, now 70 years old, is one of Japan’s legendary Ama divers or ‘sea women’ renowned for their underwater hunting skills, who follow a way of life ingrained in Japanese culture for over two thousand years—ancient texts refer to the honored task as far back as the eighth century. Originally, as well as being breadwinners for their families, they were also required to find abalone for imperial emperors. Many wear the same white diving dresses of their ancestors— instead of modern wetsuits—believed to symbolize purity and to ward off sharks.
It wasn’t until Hayashi was 29 that she earned the Ama diver title, and realized her calling to help an ancient tradition survive and be a custodian of the sea. It’s a vocation reserved only for the ‘mature’ women (usually between 40 and 90) of Ago Bay on the southern tip of the Ise-Shima Peninsula (or Shima Peninsula) in Mie Prefecture on the eastern coast of Honshu. Fast forward over 45 years and she’s still here in her beachside hut, diving everyday off the rocks behind her house.
