Remember when I showed you the black and white photos of ama, which are/were the Japanese topless pearl and sponge divers? It’s no surprise that more modern pinup photography in Japan would still make use of this cultural trope, but I was nonetheless delighted to find this lovely color ama vision:

The post about topless Japanese pearl diver women prompted a reader to rummage through his dead-tree books, resulting in this gem of an image:

The book he found it in (Eros In Hell: Sex, Blood, and Madness in Japanese Cinema) speaks of an entire genre of Japanese nude flicks based around this theme:

Glimpses of straightforward screen nudity were not uncommon even in the 1950s…. The trend was sneakily initiated by Shintoho Studios in the mid-’50s with a new genre, the “girl diver” movie. Girls were shown wet-bloused, then later topless, then later even naked as they dived for pearls in such films as Onna Shinjuo No Fukushu (Revenge Of The Pearl Queen) and Ama No Bakemono Yashiki (Haunted House Of Ama aka Girl Divers Of Spook Mansion). … More recent entries in the persistent “girl diver” sub-genre include Atsushi Fujiura’s Yobai Ama (Nasty diver, 1977) and Shikijo Ama (Lusty Diver, 1981).

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A chance conversation with a friend about the Ama of Japan (women who dove, partially nude, for pearls, kelp, sponges, and the like) led to a Google search that led, in turn, to a page of spectacular photographs (dating from the 1930s to the 1960s) by Japanese photographer Iwase Yoshiyuke. This gallery of cropped details doesn’t begin to do justice to the often-panoramic scenery of the photographs, which are well worth a visit:

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