Japan's legendary ama women shellfish divers, immortalized on stamps and in the 1967 James Bond film You Only Live Twice, have grown older and their numbers have declined but they still enjoy their work and earn enough to carry on.
Her face tanned from a lifetime outdoors, Kotoyo Motohashi, 68, has been diving without oxygen tanks since the age of 18 and is the oldest shellfish diver in Shirahama's Nojimazaki district on the tip of the Boso Peninsula, 100km southeast of Tokyo.
In the past she shared her amagoya or divers' hut with four or five other women during the season for collecting abalone, which fetch 4,400 yen (US$37) a kilogram in the nearby Shirahama cooperative, but cost double that on a Tokyo restaurant table.
"I never dive alone. I go with a group of friends who go straight from their homes and we meet opposite the Nojimazaki lighthouse," Motohashi said as she warmed herself by a brazier.
When she started as an ama -- woman of the sea in Japanese -- Motohashi only harvested tengusa, a type of red seaweed, and sazae sea snails which are highly prized in Japan. But she quickly graduated to diving deeper in search of abalone hidden in clefts in the rocks amid the forests of kelp.
The ama themselves were considered a good catch.
"As I was a very good shellfish diver, I very soon started to get marriage proposals. I was 20 when I married the son of a wealthy farming family," Motohashi said.
In 1965, a good ama could earn the equivalent of 10 million yen (US$84,750) in today's money for a season's work, from April to September, one month longer than the season these days, said Osashi Matsumoto, head of the Shirahama cooperative.
At the time, there were about 1,500 active ama in the Shirahama area, whereas today, in a town of 6,300, the shellfish divers number just 300, 50 of whom are men. The average age of the women is 67, with the youngest aged 50 and the oldest about 85, Matsumoto said.
"In my day out of a class of 40 schoolchildren, 15 of them would become ama," Motohashi said.
Diving for shellfish has traditionally been women's work in Japan for around 1,500 years since "they can withstand the cold better than men because of the different distribution of fat under the skin," Matsumoto said.
The images depicted in the 18th century erotic woodblock prints by Utamaro Kitagawa or the Bond film, in which 007 marries a white-bikini-clad ama, bear no relation to the modern divers' working dress -- thermal tights, orange sweatshirts so that boats can spot them, and neoprene diving hoods.
"When I began we used to wear white cotton tops and shorts because occasionally there were fatal accidents and white could be seen more easily under water. At first I even dived topless because it was easier to move, but the cooperative imposed the new divewear rules 20 years ago," Motohashi said.
Even though they dress unglamourously to dive, the women are self-possessed and cheerfully unabashed, and think nothing of leaving the hut door wide open as they chat and shower salt off their naked upper bodies after a dive.
"It's definitely the women who are in charge around here, and it's always been like that because in the old days the men used to go away on merchant ships or with the tuna fishing fleet," said Matsumoto, the cooperative chief.
"Young women today don't like the sea as much as we do, they lack courage and don't want to get their skin darkened by working in the water or the fields," said Motohashi, lamenting the lack of followers in her wake.
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