Down Below With South Korea’s Haenyeo

Off the coast of South Korea’s Jeju Island, the haenyeo freedivers go deep, down to 66 feet, while holding their breath for three minutes. This all-women, matriarchal society has provided fresh seafood to the island for centuries. 

When Jeju native Wooree Jo moved back to her island after 10 years away, her newfound surf obsession led to an interest in her hometown’s age-old tradition. She began freediving alongside the haenyeo to deepen her connection with the ocean beyond riding waves. “As surfing and the sea became my way of life,” Jo says, “I became invested in nature conservation. From there, it felt natural to pursue becoming a haenyeo.”

Jo enrolled in one of the island’s two government-sponsored haenyeo schools. After interning for four years, she became a full-fledged member. “The whole experience was much harder than I expected,” she says. “It still feels surreal to exist in this identity, but I’m proud to be part of respecting the culture by passing it on.”

These days, it would be nice if Jo’s story were commonplace, but, unlike the 1600s, society no longer relies solely on the haenyeo to harvest urchin, octopus, conch, and abalone. The demographic of divers is now mostly women between ages 50 and 80, as new generations continue to veer away from the livelihoods of their lineages in pursuit of safer, higher-paying, and more stable ways to make a living. The haenyeo population has gone from 23,000 at its peak to approximately 3,000 today.

But, as their numbers dwindle, a curious pattern has emerged within the last few years. Like Jo, a younger generation of Korean surfers has been breathing new life into traditional haenyeo culture. With surfing steadily becoming more popular in South Korea since the 1990s, more and more citizens have been growing to love spending time in, not just near, the water. Surfing served as an introduction to the ocean, and continued involvement in the act has developed a more profound reverence and interest.

Huntak Lee, a Jeju surfing veteran, manages the hometown café he established and dives alongside the same haenyeo who watched him grow up. He’s one of the local haenam—men who, against societal norms, have integrated themselves into the matriarchal society.

“I’ve always loved the sea,” Lee says. “It’s hard to put my finger on why it dawned on me to become a haenam specifically, but when the idea clicked together, I went to the fishing-village office and started the same day. At this point, my identity as a haenam holds more weight than my identity as a surfer. Money, intensity, and cold labor have nothing to do with why I’m a haenam. I feel more than sufficiently compensated by being able to interact with the ocean in this way regularly.”

In 2016, the haenyeo were placed on the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage list and have since been the subject of many books, articles, and documentary films. They find the rise in the outside world’s intrigue in their customs strange but welcome.

“It’s nice to be admired, because, for the longest time, we were looked down upon,” says Okyul Hyun, an 80-year-old active haenyeo and the oldest living member of a lineage of freediving women she can trace back five generations. “We’ve been here the whole time. Since we were poor, you learned to freedive to make a living once you became a teenager. Our profession was driven by necessity. It’s a privilege to be driven by interest. But haenyeo are getting older, fewer young people are taking on the work, and the ocean is much sparser than it used to be. I don’t know how much longer we’ll be here.”

Between smaller harvests and the profession’s inability to deliver stability for younger generations, the sun may be setting on the haenyeo. In some ways, there’s no stopping the inevitable. But it isn’t difficult to imagine surfers playing a more significant role in extending their era, even if just by a few decades. Hopefully, Lee and Jo’s path to their island’s diving traditions becomes more common as surfing grows on Jeju.