There are trades that explain themselves the moment you see the figures. This is one: descending ten metres on a held breath, working on the bottom with a minute of air in your lungs, surfacing, breathing and going down again. Repeated for seven hours. And doing it, in most cases, past the age of seventy.
01 What exactly the work is
The haenyeo are shellfish gatherers. They collect abalone, sea urchin, octopus, conch and seaweed by hand, and they do it on the bottom, not from the shore. The difference from any other fishery is the method: they dive with no tank, no hose and no air supply of any kind.
The kit is minimal and has changed little in essence: goggles, an iron hook to prise shellfish off the rock, a net and a buoy that marks their position on the surface and holds the catch. Today they use neoprene suits; before, cotton clothing.
The work is organised in ranks by experience, from lowest to highest: hagun, junggun and sanggun. The sanggun, the most senior, are the ones who teach the rest, decide where the group works each day and keep watch over the others in the water.
02 One minute, ten metres, seven hours
The figures of the trade are those of an endurance sport practised as a working day. Around ten metres of depth, about a minute of breath-hold per dive, and that cycle repeated for up to seven hours in a working day.
On surfacing they let out a long whistle as they empty and refill their lungs. It is called sumbisori and it is not an ornament: it is the efficient way to re-ventilate after a breath-hold, and it also lets the group know everyone has come up.
The season is not continuous. They work some ninety days a year, distributed according to the tide, the state of the sea and the periods when the area is left to rest. The rest of the year goes to other tasks, often farming.
Ten metres, a minute of air, a seven-hour day: the figures of an elite sport applied to a lifetime's work.
03 The rules that stop the sea being emptied
What makes this trade singular is not only the technique: it is that management of the resource lies in the divers' own hands. The local fishery cooperatives hold the rights over their stretch of coast, and within them it is the haenyeo who set the rules.
Those rules are concrete: minimum sizes by species, areas closed so they can recover, dates on which nobody enters the water, and one underlying prohibition that explains almost everything. No breathing equipment is used.
The reason is practical before it is ceremonial. With a tank, one person can strip a whole seabed in a day. With a minute of air, each dive is short and selective, and the physiological limit itself sets the rate at which anything can be taken.
04 The figures that worry
In 2016 haenyeo culture entered the representative list of the intangible cultural heritage of humanity. The inscription recognises a complete system: the technique, the organisation by rank, the knowledge of the seabed and the transmission between generations.
The problem lies in that last part. In 2013, when the nomination was being prepared, there were more than 4,500 active haenyeo. At the end of 2024 there were around 2,600. That is a fall of more than 40 per cent in eleven years.
The age structure is more eloquent still: more than 60 per cent are 70 or older, and adding those in their sixties gets you to 90 per cent. It is not a trade with few apprentices: it is a trade with almost none.
The causes pile up. The work is hard and poorly paid compared with almost any alternative on an island with a service economy; and the fishing grounds have shrunk because of the deterioration of the marine ecosystem and the change in water conditions.
05 What is being attempted
The institutional answer has been to turn transmission, once a family matter, into something formal. There are haenyeo schools that teach the technique to people from outside the trade, and a museum dedicated to documenting it.
The difficulty is not learning to dive: it is entering the system. The rights over each stretch of coast belong to the local cooperative, and a newcomer needs that community to accept her, place her in a rank and teach her its particular seabed, rock by rock.
That local knowledge is the part that is not written down. Where the abalone are at each state of the tide, where the current pulls and which area was left to rest last year are things you only learn in the water, with somebody in front of you.
06 How to see it without getting in the way
The first thing is to understand that it is not a show. The work can be watched from land at several points on the coast, especially first thing and at low tide, but it is a working day and it should be watched from a distance and without a camera in anyone's face.
The second route is the most useful for anyone wanting to understand the trade: the museum devoted to the haenyeo explains the kit, the ranks and the organisation, and there are points on the coast where the bulteok survive, the stone shelters with a fire where they changed and warmed up between dives.
And the third is direct: eat what they bring up, at the stalls on the shore itself, and pay for it. It is the part of the system that still works, and the only one in which a visitor can play a useful part.
