The north-west monsoon drenching Thursday Island had thrown a wilderness of grass and frangipanni over the headstones, but Tom Fujii found his long-dead friend's easily enough. He said, "They were young men when the sea took them."

Tom Fujii is 70, unwithered by age but lucky to have made the distance. In the 23 years he spent diving for pearl shell on the treacherous reefs and deeps of the Torres Strait the sea three times came close to taking his life.

"I'm alive because I was very, very careful," Tom says. But many others were equally careful and are among the 1200 Japanese divers buried in the Torres Strait islands, 800 of them in the Thursday Island cemetery.

Tom is the only survivor of the 6000-odd young Japanese imported into the Torres Strait between the 1870s and 1940. Those who escaped death by drowning, collapsed lungs or the bends were ungratefully shipped home at the end of their six-year contracts.

Tom Fujii was allowed to stay, in the words of an old friend, "because he was the best. His boss kept claiming he didn't have enough money to pay his fare back to Japan." Tom smiles quietly. "Well," he says, "I sometimes had to wait six months to get apid."

Fifty metres into the waist-high grass, studded with concrete headstones bald except for Japanese inscriptions, Tom stopped at an elaborate and unusually well-kept grave. It is that of his younger brother, Tosikuzu, who drowned April 3, 1940, aged 26, in 35 fathoms (210 feet) of water.

Somehow, Tosikuzu lost his helmet. He kicked off his boot weights and shoved himself toward the surface. It was too far and he was going up too quickly. His lungs exploded.

Tom was down himself, only 100 metres away. It took him two hours of decompression time to get to the top.

He collected his brother's body and sailed into Thursday Island to bury him.

Tom wept most of the way. Tosikuzu, the youngest of eight sons and two daughters of a poor fishing family, had become a diver with Tom's encouragement, just as Tom himself, aged 19 in 1925, had followed an elder brother to Australia.

When Tom began diving, air was supplied through hand pumps. At 50 fathoms-plus in the Darnley Deeps, it came into the helmet a faint breath at a time. Only the toughest and bravest men worked that deep, an hour on the bottom collecting up to half a ton of shell and then another two coming up.

"Some of the skippers were too greedy," Tom said. "They didn't like their divers taking so long about coming up, so they hauled them in too quickly. Usually, it killed you."

Two hundred luggers were working out of Thursday Island, all of them with Japanese crews and divers. A week seldom passed without a lugger returning with a body. Many of them were buried with scant attention to identity. Some inscriptions read simply "George, Japan."

There were innumerable ways a diver could die. Three times coral sliced through Tom's air hose. Each time, he was in about only 11 fathoms and was hauled immediately to the top, his helmet flooding as Tom forced his head backwards, his nose and mouth barely above water, and sucked from a small air pocket trapped at the helmet top.

"A lot of divers died that way," Tom said. "The deck crews simply just didn't get them up before the air pocket ran out."

With the outbfreak of war against Japan, Tom was shipped off to an internment camp at Hay in south-western NSW. He dug market gardens until 1945, when he was allowed to return to his islander wife Josephine, whom he married in 1928. Today they have four children and seven grandchildren.

Tom dived until 1951, when he joined a Japanese-Australian firm culturing pearls. Just before he retired in 1973, Tom borrowed $10,000 and built himself the $80,000 Rainbow Motel on Thursday Island.

It is run by his daughter Geraldine. Tom, who became an Australian citizen in 1961, says: "I just sit back and watch the sea." He's earned it.