Ama

Not to be confused with ama (尼), referring to Buddhist nuns.

• Japanese: 海女 (ama)

Ama were female shelldivers who collected abalone, turbo shells, and certain other highly prized marine products. As abalone, and certain other of the goods they collected, were highly prized by the shogunal and imperial courts, and as export/tribute goods, ama enjoyed considerable official protections and privileges, at least in the Edo period. Though typically of low social status, coming from fishing/villager families, ama were also frequently eroticized in literature and the visual arts.

The skills and techniques of the ama were traditionally passed down from mother to daughter, but this became more difficult in the Edo period as many families throughout the archipelago shifted from a practice of married couples living with the wife's family, to living with the husband's. This shift meant that families and villages would lose the "returns on investment," so to speak, of training young women to be ama when those women married into other families, their training and their labor then coming to benefit that family, and that village. Some families adapted to these new circumstances by arranging that if they were to marry away their ama daughter, another ama would marry into their family, contributing her labor to the family, and to the village.

References

• Arne Kalland, Fishing Villages in Tokugawa Japan, University of Hawaii Press (1995), 163-164.