Page 160 - Dark Matter Women Witnessing

AMA NO MUSUME

Mandy-Suzanne Wong

On almost every day of her long life, Sumiko Iseya (née Nagata, 1954-2040) jumped

into the Pacific Ocean and dove through shadows blue-on-blue to frigid depths of

perhaps 30 meters. She was an ama (ocean-woman), predator-daughter-mother of the

deep. Not for her any scuba, snuba, snorkel. Sumiko learned to dive from her

foremothers, learned to breathe from whales. Down to the seafloor, reef, kelp forest,

where she stayed for 2 minutes, ascending with laden hands, breaking the surface with

a gasp like a cry of pain — exhaled in a long whistle which some called the sea's lament

(iso nageki). She deposited her load in a floating wooden barrel and dove again: 50

dives an hour.

She was after snails: sazae with silver shells like inverted whirlpools and their sisters,

awabi, mother-of-pearl abalone with expressive eyes. She also hunted their cousins,

octopi, urchins, spiny lobsters, sea stars, seaweeds, and sea cucumbers (namako). But

awabi were above all: noshi awabi was the sacred sustenance of the divine kami

Amaterasu, ancestress of all Japan, and luxury markets paid ¥8000 per pound of awabi

sashimi.

Even men followed awabi into the water when prawns were scarce or finned fishes

weren't biting. Men preferred fishing from boats atop the sunlit surface. Grubbing in the

sand in all the perilous betweens, between light and dark, air and water, life and death;