What’s black and fuzzy and keeps you from wanting to buy a $50,000 beach house?

Hello from the Shima Peninsula in rural Japan. After a few days in Tokyo, we hopped on a few trains and made our way southwest to Ise-Shima National Park. The trees are thick here, the bugs are big and the rugged coastline is dotted with little coves and pearl farms. The Ise Jingu shrine, often called “The Heart of Japan” is located here and we came to see it. We’re also here to explore pearl cultivation and the revered Ama divers. What is an Ama diver, you ask? Years ago, I read a book called The Island of Sea Women by Lisa See, which explores the lives of free-diving women. They spend hours each day diving up to 100 feet to gather abalone, urchin, shellfish and other marvels to sell. In many places around Japan and Korea during wartime and rationing, Ama divers were the sole “fishwinners”- providing for their families during times when other work and money was very hard to come by. When we were researching this trip and discovered that Ama divers still work in this part of Japan, we added it to the itinerary.

We happened to be in Ise over my birthday, so we went out to a pearl farm and met an Ama diver to celebrate. Although Ama divers still exist in Japan, the numbers of divers are dwindling and once robust groups of 20+ women are now down to 2 or 3. Climate change has greatly affected the work they do as warmer oceans have more intense currents-so the Amas were only able to dive 2 times in the past month. We were lucky enough to meet an Ama diver who made us lunch from her catch that day. She was 77 years old and still braves the currents two times a day for several hours, impressive. We ate squid, abalone, scallops, octopus, and other things that I don’t even know the English name for. Some of the creatures died and squirmed on the hot coals in front of us and it took every ounce of politeness Luna had to not rip them off the grill to save them all. 

Pearl cultivation is big business here in the Ise Peninsula, as the famous Mikimoto established his company here years ago and created the first cultured pearl. He changed the industry and perfected pearls in the process. When we took a little boat out through seaweed farms and small coves, we went to a protected little bay where we met a group of older women working at a pearl farm. After riding in a boat to get there- Josh looked at me and said, “well we know it’s YOUR birthday because I’m in a boat.” I laughed because he hates boats, but he didn’t even get seasick on our 20 minute ride in the boat, yay. To cultivate pearls, you essentially injure the oyster with a small piece of debris placed inside the shell and then the pearl is the healing of that injury. It can take years to create a single pearl, so millions and millions of oysters are suspended in the sea in rope cages, working to create pearls. The group of women we met were in their 70’s, and they’ve been doing this work for decades. Photos of previous, more prosperous times dotted their walls. They’ve seen the young people move out from the small towns and the pearl industry shift to become less profitable as other places around the world learned to cultivate pearls as well.

We always love talking with locals when we can, and we met a man who was telling us about real estate in Japan. Apparently, on the Ise Shima Peninsula, you can get a four bedroom beachside house for 50k. He did this and is quite happy living here with his family. Real estate is so different in Japan than anywhere else I’ve ever been, with properties losing value across the board over time instead of gaining it. The population of Japan is supposed to plummet by 50% in the next 25 years, which doesn’t help the demand for properties either. We did some research and found properties as low as 20k around Japan.  All of the young people are leaving small towns, gutting them and leaving the older people to die alone. It’s a very strange conundrum for a government to deal with and if you want to move to Japan, you can get a house pretty reasonably, it seems.

After spending a few nights in Ise-Shima National Park, my dreams of beach houses were thwarted by battles with 5 inch furry spiders in our room most evenings. When I say battle, I mean me screaming out in surprise and leaping behind a door while Josh battled it. The spiders moved really quickly and because of the Japanese architecture, would crawl up and safely hide into the tracks of the sliding doors which move to create new spaces. I’ve always love Japanese architecture until it magically harbored gigantic bugs. When we told the staff about the bugs, they told us at least they weren’t the giant centipedes that are poisonous and at that point I decided I’m going to leave all the cheap beach houses for everyone else to enjoy.

We adopted a stray cat and named him Bonito during our stay in Ise. The cat got his name after we’d purchased some dried fish flakes made from the fish bonito and fed them to the cat. He was very happy, having eaten whole plates full of dried fish several days in a row- we are suckers- but I think we may have done ourselves a disservice, as he wasn’t eating his typical diet of giant spiders.

Our days of this trip are ticking down to the end and we have about a week left in Japan before we fly to Seattle for a big reunion with my side of the family, yay!!

sending love to you,

Carly