Japan
Tsushima
An island nearer Korea than Japan, where a wildcat found nowhere else stalks the forest.
Busan glows on the horizon after dark. Tsushima sits mid-strait between Kyūshū and the Korean peninsula, closer to Korea than to any Japanese city, and its culture, ecology and history all reflect a position between two worlds. Nine-tenths of the island is mountain and primeval forest, and somewhere in it lives the Tsushima leopard cat, a wild cat found on no other island on Earth.
For a thousand years Tsushima was the gateway between Japan and the continent: a seventh-century fortress, Kaneda Castle, guarded it against invasion, and in the Edo period the island's lords hosted Korean embassies of five hundred people on their way to Edo, a procession the Izuhara port festival still re-enacts. From the lookout at the northern tip you can see Korea by day and the lights of Busan by night. The island's rarest resident is the Tsushima leopard cat, a critically endangered subspecies interpreted at the wildlife conservation centre at Saozaki, and its forests hold sacred groves no one is permitted to cut. Its soul food, rokubee noodles of fermented sweet-potato starch, is said to have come from Korea, and no island in Japan lands more conger eel.
Solo
Tsushima's remoteness and ecological sensitivity make it a place for the traveller alone who prefers wildlife, walking and history to infrastructure — and who will look for the cat at the conservation centre, not on the roads at night.
- The island lies closer to Korea than to mainland Japan — from the northern lookout you can see the lights of Busan at night.
- The Tsushima leopard cat, a critically endangered wild cat found only here, has its own conservation centre at Saozaki.
- Nine-tenths of the island is mountain and primeval forest, with sacred groves where no tree may be cut.
- A seventh-century fortress and the re-enacted procession of Korean embassies mark a thousand years as Japan's door to the continent.
Rokubee — noodles of fermented sweet-potato starch in hot broth, the island's soul food, said to have come across from Korea.
Anago conger eel, boiled or fried soft and juicy on nigiri — no island in Japan lands more of it.
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