Activities
Depending on the region, ama may dive with masks, fins, and torso-covering wetsuits at the most. Only divers who work for tourist attractions use white, partially transparent suits.
Ama are famous for pearl diving, but originally they dove for food like seaweed, shellfish, lobsters, octopus, and sea urchins — and oysters which sometimes have pearls.
Ama can keep diving well into old age. The older divers are generally able to stay submerged longer than the younger. Usually they also have another job, typically working on a farm. The Japanese believe that the majority of ama are women because of how their bodies differ from men: The fat on a female body is distributed differently than on men, which ensures that they can stay warmer in colder water.
Read more about this topic: Ama (diving)
Famous quotes containing the word activities:
“Minds do not act together in public; they simply stick together; and when their private activities are resumed, they fly apart again.”
—Frank Moore Colby (1865–1925)
“I am admonished in many ways that time is pushing me inexorably along. I am approaching the threshold of age; in 1977 I shall be 142. This is no time to be flitting about the earth. I must cease from the activities proper to youth and begin to take on the dignities and gravities and inertia proper to that season of honorable senility which is on its way.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“If it is to be done well, child-rearing requires, more than most activities of life, a good deal of decentering from one’s own needs and perspectives. Such decentering is relatively easy when a society is stable and when there is an extended, supportive structure that the parent can depend upon.”
—David Elkind (20th century)