TOMIKO IWASAKI

Ama diver of Toba: sixty years beneath the waves, and a teacher of the next divers

She was eighty-one years old and could still hold her breath for ninety seconds. Tomiko Iwasaki, known to everyone in Toba as Tomi-baa, was born in 1939 on the island of Toshijima, into a line of women who had gone down to the sea for more than a thousand years. Her mother taught her to dive at fifteen, in the shallows, with a wooden tub for a float and a white headscarf stitched with the Seiman and Dōman charms, the star and the grid, that every ama wears to keep the sea's spirits at bay.

For more than six decades Tomi-baa dove in the cold water off Ise-Shima in the traditional white cotton costume, harvesting awabi, turban shells and seaweed with a short iron chisel. She worked down to ten metres on a single breath, and when she surfaced she released a long, high whistle, the isobue, that sounded like a bird calling across the water. In summers she dove in the demonstrations at Mikimoto Pearl Island, where visitors from Osaka and abroad asked for photographs and she gave them, politely, in exchange for a handshake. She married the fisherman Tsuneo in 1962 and raised two children on what the sea gave them. Over the years she taught eleven younger women to dive, including her granddaughter Aya, and she would quietly take away the catch of anyone who harvested more than the sea could spare.

On her days off she grew sweet potatoes, hummed enka songs while grilling fish, and sat in the amagoya, the divers' hut, sharing tea and gossip with women she had known for fifty years. She dove for the last time in the autumn of 2019 and died peacefully on 19 November 2020, five months after her eighty-first birthday. She leaves her daughter Michiko, her son Kazuo and four grandchildren, and a stretch of Ise Bay where a whistle can still be heard.

“The sea gives, but only to those who do not take it all.”