Tsushima Onsen

Tsushima Onsen is situated on Tsushima Island in Nagasaki Prefecture, a remote island in the Korea Strait positioned almost equidistant between Japan and Korea, closer to Busan than to Fukuoka, and the site of the decisive Battle of Tsushima in 1905 — one of the most complete naval victories in modern history, when the Japanese fleet under Admiral Tōgō Heihachirō annihilated the Russian Baltic Fleet after its 18,000-mile voyage around the world, effectively ending the Russo-Japanese War and establishing Japan as a major naval power. The island is today also famous for two very different reasons: the enormous influx of Korean tourists who come by ferry from Busan specifically to shop and sightsee (making Tsushima essentially a duty-free shopping destination for Korean visitors), and the critically endangered Tsushima leopard cat (Tsushima yamaneko) — an isolated subspecies of the leopard cat found only on Tsushima and the focus of intensive conservation efforts. The onsen provide silica-rich mineral bathing in an island whose strategic position in the Korea Strait has made it a crossroads of Korean-Japanese history across a millennium of interaction.