Paper short abstract:

Revisiting my article, 'Tourism and the Ama: the search for a real Japan', this paper considers Japanese nostalgia for the past and traditional lifestyles, through NHK's 'Amachan'. This 2013 asadora was hugely successful and has been called a social phenomenon. What exactly does this mean?

Paper long abstract:

In the 1980s, domestic Japanese tourism was often based on a nostalgia for a Japan that was rapidly vanishing. Diving for seafood, the work of the ama, was a form of ancient and traditional fishing that was seen to be disappearing at an accelerated rate. Daughters in ama villages were seeking other sorts of employment and by the turn of the century even Kuzaki, where I did my fieldwork in 1984-5, was finally experiencing depopulation. No one wanted to be an ama, it was too hard -- this was said even in the 1980s.

However, older divers continue to dive, Mikimoto continues to put on tourist demonstrations of 'pearl divers', the Japanese are trying to have ama diving designated an UNESCO form of intangible culture and the NHK asadora 'Amachan' has caused at least one young teenager to take up learning to dive.

This paper examines the hugely successful television series in an attempt to understand the twenty-first century's nostalgia for this way of life. How is the past being remembered? Why are divers of such interest to the Japanese? Some examination of the history of depicting divers in romantic poems and erotic prints may help us understand the cult of the ama, but 'Amachan' did not necessarily go down that line as much as it involved 'finding oneself' -- that is, it was about one's ikigai in contemporary Japan.

The series also constrasts the past and the present; Japan at the height of its economic success and post-bubble society; and appears to offer hope to Japanese youth. Its messages seem to have struck an important cord, particularly after the events of 3/11. This is not a television program to be ignored.