If you are looking for a pointer for the future of the world, the free-diving fisherwomen on the matriarchal, shamanistic South Korean island of Jeju are not an obvious example of where we’re heading. Because the haenyeo are famously unique. And famously hardy. But what is happening to them should concern us all.
In simple wetsuits they spend hours in the cold, clear waters, seeking out sea slugs, oysters, conches and abalone. They are fiercely independent – they spearheaded resistance to the Japanese in the 1930s and 1940s. But here’s the thing, as Nari (age 70) tells me in the haenyeo’s coastal mud-room: ‘We are probably the last. We have been diving since the men went to war in the 18th century, but maybe no one will do this in 20 years’ time.’
I have never been to a sizeable town which is so eerily and unnervingly quiet, car-free and people-less
The stats bear out her pessimism. In the 1960s there were around 20,000 haenyeo; now there are just 2,000 or so. The vast majority are over 50. Only 20-odd girls began haenyeo training last year. The decline isn’t just because this diving is hard (although it is also lucrative). It is because Jeju, like the rest of Korea – indeed, the rest of Asia and pretty soon most of the world – is swiftly ageing and will soon start depopulating.
The median age of Jeju – population 600,000 – is 58. For contrast, in Britain it is 40, in the USA 39 and in wider Korea 45. This is partly because Jeju, with its fine beaches and clean air, attracts retirees, but also because no one is having children. In Jeju, the total fertility rate is around 0.9 – less than one child per woman – when the replacement rate is 2.1.
The result, especially out of high season, when youthful tourists are gone, is a noticeably and painfully aged society. Schools are merging, or closing entirely. Outside central Jeju City, the lack of children, in playgrounds and schoolyards and on the streets, is stark.
As I walk around, struck by the silence and by the octogenarian tangerine sellers and parking attendants (South Korea has a policy of getting the old back into work), I realise I have witnessed this lack of children’s laughter once before: during the lockdowns. When all the schools by my London flat were shut and the joyous babble of kids – the giggles, whoops and shouts so constant I never really noticed their presence before – suddenly became a piercing absence. Like someone had removed all the birds from an ancient wood, along with their endless ambient song.
Again, we could console ourselves that weird South Korea is an outlier. South Korea is, after all, the hermit kingdom. Before it finally opened up in the 19th century, it was probably the most isolated large country on Earth (North Korea continues the tradition).
However, as we know, South Korea might be culturally quirky, but in plunging birth rates it is far from special. It is, arguably, just leading the pack. Last week, it was announced that England and Wales have their lowest birth rate in written history: 1.44 births per woman. The same is happening in the USA, where births are at a record low, and also in Europe, Asia and the Americas. Such is the collapse that significant countries are starting to depopulate: Italy, Cuba, Portugal, China, Romania and Japan. Many of these have long suffered from emigration; the difference is that in the past natural live births easily replaced the émigrés. Not any more.
Why is this happening? A hundred plausible explanations have been advanced, from microplastics to female emancipation, from the death of religion to hormones in the water supply, from online porn to the distraction of smartphones. Regarding the latter, in Seoul they have traffic lights set in the ground by intersections so that people staring down at their phones can at the same time see ‘Don’t walk’ red lights, and won’t step into traffic.
In truth, the answer must be a complex cocktail, with perhaps some ingredients we don’t yet recognise. All we can do is examine the flavour, and on this trip I am also visiting Japan (median age 49; birth rate 1.37), and it’s there that I get a striking early taste of our childless future.
It happens in the lovely little sake-brewing town of Hida Furukawa, in Gifu Prefecture, central Japan. The population has declined by half in 50 years and now teeters on the edge of feasibility, as the surviving population of 20,000 is so old. I have never been to a sizeable town which is so eerily and unnervingly quiet, car-free and people-less. At night, as I walk between the temples and the ginkgos, along the lamplit canals filled with golden carp, I do not see a soul. I am utterly alone with the fireflies. It’s like strolling through a melancholic haiku.
The next day I wake up to bright sunshine, burning the mist off the forested Japanese Alps, and I see a rare and magnificent pair of mountain hawk eagles, in the middle of town, soaring above the bridge. If Hida Furukawa was busy and noisy, they would surely not come here, but now, as it falls silent, nature returns. As I walk to one of the town’s last izakayas for a cup of warm sake, I am reminded of the words of the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins: ‘Let them be left,/ O let them be left…/ Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.’
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