A figure emerges from the waves. No oxygen tank. No modern equipment. No diving computer. Just a blacksuit, a net of shellfish, mollusks, and marine plants. The diver is not an athlete. Not a modern professional. She is what they call Haenyeo, “a woman of the sea” from South Korea’s Jeju Island. If we consider how many traditional occupations disappear when technological progress offers safer, faster, and more profitable alternatives, then Haenyeos should not exist anymore. Horse-drawn transportation gave way to automobiles. Manual labor has increasingly been replaced by machines. The exception to this pattern is evidenced by the Haenyeos, who continue to descend into the ocean using traditional techniques passed down through generations. Their presence has survived, thus posing an important question. Why has this centuries-old tradition endured? History presents a compelling case that the survival of this tradition cannot be explained by economic necessity alone. This essay will argue that the Hanyeo have endured because their tradition fuses environmental management and community governance into a cultural institution that no modern alternatives can replace.
The chronological evolution of this tradition can be described as follows. In its earliest period, diving was primarily a means of survival. Note that Jeju is a volcanic island whose soil made conventional farming difficult, especially for coastal communities. The Jeju Haenyeo Museum explains, “Because farmland is scarce in Jeju due to its volcanic nature, the Jeju people have cultivated the sea like farmland.” The ocean therefore served as an extension of the land: a “sea farm” from which residents collected abalone, conch, sea cucumber, seaweed, and other marine products (Jeju Haenyeo Museum). These resources supplied food, supported household income, and could be presented to political authorities as tribute. The origins of diving on Jeju Island can be traced back more than a thousand years. The Haenyo Museum notes that diving appears to have begun even before the period of the Three Kingdoms (57 BCE – 668 CE), based on records of Jeju contributing pearls to the King (Jeju Provincial Self-governing Haenyeo Museum). Later records from the Joseon dynasty provide clearer documentation of divers harvesting marine products around Jeju.
During this early stage, the tradition was a response to the island’s environment. Coastal families had to understand currents, tides, seasons, and the location of marine life because such knowledge directly affected whether they could eat and earn an income. Diving was dangerous, but the sea offered resources that the island’s limited farmland could not. The origin of the tradition thus established a relationship that would remain central for centuries. The people of Jeju depended on the ocean, but that dependence also required careful observation of the ocean’s limits. Long before sustainability became a formal environmental concept, divers had to recognize spawning seasons, changes in weather, and the time needed for marine populations to recover.
Around the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the tradition evolved into a predominantly female profession. The Korea Heritage Service states that “the history of women divers dates back to at least before the 17th century,” based on documentary records from Jeju. Earlier diving had included men, but women gradually became dominant. Joo-Young Lee and Hyo Hyun Lee of Seoul National University explain that “until the 18th century, diving in Jeju was mostly done by men.” They add that women later “took over the diving work, because of heavy taxes imposed on males, and thus became the breadwinner” (Lee and Lee 2). Other historical pressures, including men’s military obligations and the dangers of offshore fishing, may also have contributed to this shift. Regardless of the exact combination of causes, the transition fundamentally transformed both the occupation and the social structure of Jeju society.
As female divers became responsible for a large share of household income, they gained an economic position that differed from the roles available to many women elsewhere in Korea. Mainland society was strongly influenced by Confucian expectations of male authority, but haenyeo households often relied on women’s earnings for food, education, property, and family security. This did not make Jeju a fully matriarchal or equal society, yet it gave working women unusual independence and public responsibility. The haenyeo were central economic actors whose labor sustained families and villages. Their growing importance also strengthened cooperation among the divers. Because they faced the same risks and depended on the same fishing grounds, they developed rules, work groups, and methods of collective decision-making.
The tradition acquired a political dimension during the Japanese colonial period. Colonial fishing associations and merchants attempted to control the sale of marine products and reduce the earnings of local divers. In 1931 and 1932, haenyeo organized protests against these exploitative arrangements. The Jeju 4-3 Peace Foundation describes the resulting movement as the largest anti-Japanese movement on Jeju during colonial rule and the largest fishers’ uprising in Korea, with approximately 17,000 cumulative participants. This episode matters because it shows that the haenyeo community managed shared resources and could also organize resistance. The women defended their right to participate in decisions affecting their labor and communities. Their tradition consequently became associated with collective action, independence, and civic courage as well as physical endurance.
In the second half of the twentieth century, modernization altered the practice again. The most visible change involved clothing. For generations, haenyeo worked in thin cotton bathing suits that offered little protection against cold water. Lee and Lee explain that the divers “began to wear wetsuits to avoid severe cold stress” in the mid-1970s (5). Wetsuits, masks, fins, gloves, and flotation devices allowed them to remain in the water longer and made their work safer and more productive. Yet these innovations did not alter the defining principle of the tradition since haenyeo continued to dive without oxygen tanks. Modern equipment protects the body and helps movement, but it does not replace the diver’s breath control, knowledge, or judgment. The haenyeo adapted the parts of their work that could reduce unnecessary danger while preserving the skills and principles that define the practice.
At the same time, industrialization and expanded educational opportunities gave younger women alternatives to dangerous marine labor. The number of active haenyeo declined, while the average age of those who remained increased. Lee and Lee warned that the tradition could disappear within ten to fifteen years because of the aging population. This prediction has not yet come true, but it shows that knowledge cannot remain a living heritage if there are too few practitioners to receive and use it. In response, the meaning of the haenyeo shifted once more. A livelihood that had once been taken for granted became something deliberately documented, taught, and protected. In 2016, UNESCO inscribed the Culture of Jeju Haenyeo on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. Modern recognition has brought museums, training programs, exhibitions, documentaries, and tourism attention. However, increased visibility also raises questions about how the tradition should be preserved. Efforts to protect haenyeo culture must support the women and their working communities rather than reducing them to picturesque symbols for visitors.
In terms of how this tradition is practiced today, several connected features distinguish it from ordinary commercial fishing. The first is breath-hold diving, known as muljil. Park et al. explain that haenyeo are “characterized by their free, or ‘breath-hold,’ diving,” through which they collect seafood without breathing equipment. UNESCO reports that divers may descend about ten meters, remain underwater for roughly a minute at a time, and repeat the process over many hours. Every dive requires the haenyeo to judge depth, water pressure, current, remaining oxygen, and the distance back to the surface. A mistake of only a few seconds can become life-threatening. Skill therefore consists as much of restraint and accurate self-knowledge as of strength.
When a haenyeo surfaces, she releases a distinctive whistling breath called Sumbisori. The sound rapidly expels carbon dioxide and draws in fresh air before the next descent. It also makes the diver’s presence audible to others nearby. Each diver must control her own breathing, but she works within a group that listens and watches. The Jeju Haenyeo Museum states plainly that haenyeo should not dive alone because group work helps them avoid dangerous situations.
As far as how this tradition is celebrated and practiced today goes, one of the most distinct features of the Haenyeo tradition is its reliance on human ability, as Park et al. explains that they are “characterized by their free, or ‘breath-hold’, diving, in which they dive to collect seafood without any special equipment,” which shows that the tradition continues to prioritize human knowledge and judgment over technological substitutes. The tradition has also adapted to changes in clothing and equipment. Lee and Lee state that Haenyeo originally wore cotton bathing suits, but that they “began to wear wetsuits to avoid severe cold stress instead of the cotton bathing suit from the mid 1970’s,” making diving safer and more productive while preserving the central rule of avoiding oxygen tanks.
The significance of this tradition lies in how it joins several forms of heritage that are usually considered separately. It is an occupational heritage, since it preserves specialized techniques for harvesting marine products. It is also an ecological heritage, since it contains accumulated knowledge of tides, winds, underwater geography, seasons, and species. It is social heritage, since it depends on cooperatives, senior mentorship, and collective rules. It is also women’s history, because generations of female workers became household providers, community leaders, and political actors. Park et al. describe haenyeo culture as a “symbol of Jeju Island’s spirit” and a marine heritage representing the identity of a Korean coastal village, which reflects the island’s history of adapting to a difficult environment through endurance and cooperation.
The haenyeo also adds another dimension to what empowerment entails. Their economic importance gave many women independence and authority, but their work remained exhausting and dangerous. UNESCO notes that haenyeo culture has “contributed to the advancement of women’s status in the community” (UNESCO). Their authority also extended beyond earning income. Lee and Myong observe that “The Haenyeo did not remain silent in the face of social injustice and infringement on rights and interests.” The 1931–1932 uprising demonstrates this collective power, where the women organized to defend their livelihoods against colonial exploitation. Their cultural significance lies in the systems of mutual aid, and knowledge that they built in response to difficult conditions.
To the modern haenyeo, the meaning of the tradition can be characterized by inheritance and responsibility. A younger diver inherits knowledge about where marine species live, how currents behave, when the weather is turning dangerous, and how long her own body can remain underwater. She also inherits obligations of listening to senior divers, protecting less experienced members, obeying harvesting limits, participating in collective decisions, and leaving enough marine life for the future. In this system, inheritance is inseparable from accountability. Knowledge belongs to the community because it was accumulated through generations of shared experience.
Viewed across its history, the survival of the haenyeo culture isn’t due to their economic necessity alone. The tradition began because Jeju’s coastal communities needed the ocean for food and income, but it endured because generations of women turned difficult labor into a durable social institution. They created methods for teaching skill, protecting one another, governing shared fishing grounds, limiting harvests, and asserting their collective rights. The haenyeo tradition will sustain itself wherever knowledge is passed on from an experienced diver to a learner or a community limits today’s catch for tomorrow’s sea. For that reason, the haenyeo are an answer to the question of how people can work with nature and depend on each other while carrying inherited knowledge into the future.
By: Aiden
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