The 69-year-old is among only 500 “ama” divers in Japan's rural Mie Prefecture, down from more than 4,000 such professionals in the 1970s. Across Japan, only about 2,000 ama divers are left.

At the start of each fishing season, ama gather to pray for safety and a bountiful harvest. In coastal shrines, they offer ...

Pearl oysters have historically been found in the Ise-Shima region, and ama are commonly described outside Japan – anachronistically – as “pearl divers”. However, harvesting of natural ...

Clad in wetsuits, ama divers submerge to great depths without air tanks to gather abalone, seaweed and other seafood, and sometimes pearls. They exist only in Japan and South Korea, but in the ...

Ago Bay lies beneath a rolling coastline lined with lush green trees in the Mie Prefecture of Japan ... of a young Ama who has taken it right from the water, while her fellow divers look ...

The Haenyeo, an all-female group of divers on South Korea’s Jeju Island, spend much of their lives underwater without ...

is rated among the top 100 soundscapes of Japan. A diver adds an abalone to her floating basket during a demonstration at Mikimoto Pearl Island.Credit: iStock At one time, ama dived for Akoya ...

The Ama are female freedivers who have gathered pearls, lobsters and shellfish in Japan's coastal waters for millennia, and who feature heavily in local folklore. There were some 6,000 of these ...

For centuries, women known as Ama divers have collected seafood off the coast of the Kii Peninsula without the use of breathing equipment. CNN meets some of the women carrying on this tradition.

Japan's storied "ama" prayed for an abundant catch in a ceremony held by these female free divers for decades. This year, however, most of the 80 white-clad participants in the weekend event in ...