Tsushima 対馬 is a really interesting place. Halfway between Korea and Japan, it was ruled for hundreds of years by the Sо̄ samurai house 宗家, retainers to the various successive shogunates *and* by the late 16th c. if not earlier, vassals to the kings of Joseon 朝鮮 (Korea) as well. Unlike the Shimazu house 島津家 of Kagoshima 鹿児島, who conquered the kingdom of Lūchū (Ryūkyū) 琉球 and then treated it in some respects as a vassal state, including by bringing Luchuan embassies to Edo as part of their retainer band and/or simultaneously as representatives of a foreign kingdom under the Shimazu’s sway, by contrast, the Sо̄ did roughly the reverse. Though certainly powerfully protective of their special status as intermediaries with Korea, they were retainers or vassals to both the Tokugawa shoguns and the Korean kings, and so they escorted Korean embassies to Edo less as a display of power than as a fulfillment of obligations of service.
Though the island had been ruled by samurai houses for centuries upon centuries, if I recall correctly, I believe that Joseon officials, scholars, poets, etc. regularly wrote of the island as being fundamentally Korean territory, stolen from Silla or Paekche. And come the late 19th century, Tsushima, like Ryukyu, Ezo (Hokkaido), and several other locations, became a contentious borderland, with Russians and others testing the shogunate to see if it would defend the idea of Tsushima being fully Japanese territory; the Sо̄, understandably, were out of their depth against this threat and begged the shogun to strip them of their fief – that is, for the shogunate to take over Tsushima and deal with the issue themselves.
A location like this… I’ve always thought about how the Sо̄ – and their retainers, and others from the island – might perhaps feel a strong sense of ownership and/or belonging to this island, and a conceptual or cultural distance from mainland Japan. I guess in a way it’s a bit hard to put into words what I mean; and, to be honest, the idea I’m trying to get at could honestly go for a wide range of other domains (regions, prefectures), and not only in Japan but in almost any country. Still – I always imagined a sort of feeling of difference when thinking about places like Tsushima, Kagoshima, Matsumae, though again it could apply just as easily to almost anywhere else. This idea of one’s domain as one’s own, distinct, separate territory – “home” – as contrasted with the feel, the vibe, not to mention the climate (and flora and fauna and so forth) of Edo or Kyoto. Coming to Tsushima feels like I’m visiting a particular family’s personal domain, in a way that visiting Fukuoka, Osaka, Kyoto, Yokohama, does not.
That said, how does it actually feel? Well, Tsushima is a massive island, and since I had only 24 hours on the island, and no Japanese driver’s license, I stayed in a rather small, walkable, central downtown part of Izuhara 厳原 – the main port city, home to the current modern City Hall and to the former castle seat of the Sо̄ house. So, I can’t say what the rest of the island feels like. But, just from walking around town, visiting temples, shrines, castle ruins, etc., I have to say, I’m actually surprised to feel like it doesn’t feel all that different from some … for lack of a better word, generic, mainstream, mainland Japanese feeling.
When I visited Kagoshima, or islands in the Inland Sea (Hiroshima prefecture), each of those two places felt very distinct. Felt like I was really experiencing the vibe of a different side of Japan, a different region. And Amami О̄shima and Okinawa of course all the more so. Going from Tokyo to Yokohama, Kamakura, Kyoto, Osaka, each of these also had their own distinctive feel. Izuhara… surprisingly… doesn’t. Or, didn’t, to me, in my personal and very limited one-day experience of the island. I dunno. Felt, really, not all that different from other parts of Kyushu or slightly rural / small-town mainland Japan that I’ve been to. Not precisely the same as Wakayama or Utsunomiya or Hikone, of course, but shades of difference rather than a more fully distinct, unique, Tsushima vibe.
Nevertheless, of course, I am very glad and excited to have visited there.
Trying to remember what other towns it sort of reminds me of. The walk from the port terminal into town reminded me of some slightly more rural parts of mainland Kagoshima I’ve been to, and parts of Naze or Kasari-chо̄ on Amami, where you’re walking in an area that really is meant for cars, and you’re wondering how much farther it’ll be before you get to a more properly walkable area with a denser collection of shops, etc. But, on Tsushima, I knew from Google Maps that it would be only a 10 minute walk. And then, bam, there it was – a main street with a large supermarket, post office, banks, a real “city center” sort of feel – like being in Fukuoka City, or any random part of Tokyo, just, smaller. Confined to a much smaller area.
Walking out past that area, it starts to feel like a lot of former castle-towns, or former post-station towns, that I’ve been to. A mix of traditional and modern architecture, dense but not super dense. Hard to know the right way to put it into words. Kind of quaint and touristy in some small sections, and very ordinary urban in some other sections, and then just quiet and “I don’t think there’s anything really to see farther out this way.”
While not being able to drive out further on the island is a bummer, the historical center (I shouldn’t call it “touristy”; I’ve seen literally *one* touristy shop selling souvenirs, postcards; that’s it) is thankfully very walkable. I was nervous about the timing, since I couldn’t get a jetfoil ferry over there from Hakata any earlier than one which arrives on Tsushima at 12:45pm; and I couldn’t get one back that leaves any later than 13:25pm. So I literally had just an afternoon, and a morning – nothing even approaching two days on the island, even though I stayed overnight. But, nevertheless, I was able to walk from the port to the center of town in about 10 mins; from there to the new Museum, the only slightly older Korean Embassies Museum 朝鮮通信使資料館, and the Banshо̄-in temple in about 10-15 mins; from there to Chо̄ju-in temple, where the famous Tsushima foreign relations official Amenomori Hо̄shū 雨森芳洲 is buried, in another 15 mins or so… And, my “hotel” for the night was also only about 5-10 min walk from the center of town. I actually rented a room at one of the town’s historic temples, and in terms of how new and nice the room felt, and the amenities and so forth, it was certainly as nice as any hotel I’ve stayed in.
One point, for anyone thinking of visiting – while the city center is not by any means devoid of banks, a post office, one singular FamilyMart, a Docomo store (where I was able to rent a portable cellphone charger), and so forth, and while all of these are with very easy 5-10 walk from the center of town, I realized very quickly that, unlike in Kyoto or Tokyo or other places, you can’t just walk and expect to run into them. In big cities, I will usually just head to a given temple, museum, or other site, and expect that I will reliably hit a convenience store or at least a vending machine along the way. Not so in Izuhara. Going from the main tourist info center to the Museum, to Banshо̄-in, you will encounter zero cafes, zero convenience stores, zero ATMs, I’m not even sure there are any soda vending machines (until you get to Banshо̄-in), unless you intentionally go and walk 5 mins in the opposite direction, deeper into the real center of town, to get to those destinations.
But, back to talking about the sights:
Visiting the Sо̄ family temple of Banshо̄-in and getting to see the graves of each of the successive heads of the family, and many of their wives and children, was very cool. It’s something like this that I think makes me feel especially strongly that feeling of this being their domain. And while the fact that lords’ wives and children (and the lords themselves, especially when they were children) typically spent an extremely significant portion of their lives in Edo and not “home” in the domain complicates this, nevertheless, there is this feeling that Tsushima is where the ancestors’ graves are, where the family “home” castle and home domain is. The mountains, the rivers, the docks, the particular temples and shrines and town streets that are “home” to someone from Tsushima. Of course, there’s the complicating factor again of the question of just how often a lord – or any other particular individual of any status – actually walked those streets, or visited those ports, or those temples or shrines. But, let’s not get ourselves distracted. It’s the feeling that comes with knowing, and seeing, those ancestral graves here, on Tsushima, in/atop the earth of this island, at Banshо̄-in and not at some temple in Kyoto – the Banshо̄-in, the Banshо̄-in temple that means so much to the Sо̄ family and which most people not from Tsushima would never have heard of. The Kaneishi castle which was home to so many generations of Sо̄ family heads, their wives and other relatives, their retainers and officials and their staffs… The Kaneishi castle that felt like home to so many – and like an intimidating, impressive, center of power to so many others – and which, again, was utterly unknown to so many more.
Today, there is even less of that castle than I might have expected. The main gate has been restored, and looks very cool and iconic. But beyond it, there is (unless I missed something?) more or less nothing to be seen. At Fukuoka castle, at least, there are stone walls and moats, and one can walk around and see signs denoting what buildings used to stand where, and what portion of the castle grounds you’re now in. Not so much at Kaneishi.
What there is, however, is the brand new Tsushima Museum 対馬博物館, which opened literally less than a month ago – April 30, 2022. I had heard about it, somehow, and – not as if I was going to zoom over there anyway, in the middle of a pandemic, and amidst various other trips that I did end up making over the past several years – I waited and watched, and paid attention, so that I could be sure that when (if) I ever did go to Tsushima, it would be after they opened.
It’s a gorgeous, impressive, building. Looks great inside and out, I feel. A distinctive, dark, style – this was definitely a choice – but I think it works. Sleek, looks and feels very new. Feels to me like a cool, very compelling place to want to have meetings, or just to spend time. If there were a café or something, I’d definitely see it as a place to just go and enjoy the atmosphere, to either sit and read/work or to talk with friends… there are several spaces in the building with chairs and tables in beautiful nooks that could be great for this, if only there were a café serving food and beverages.
The permanent exhibits galleries were, as might be expected, very sleek, new, very contemporary-feeling. As much as I wish I were more expert at gallery design, I don’t really quite have the eye for what exactly to note, what exactly was or wasn’t innovative or up-to-date reflective of the newest trends. But it certainly felt sleek and new to me.
I am so glad the Museum allowed photos in the permanent galleries. I did buy a catalog, but even so, so happy to have been able to take and keep all these photos, remind myself not just of the items but of the views and spaces and experience of walking through it. And to be able to share these images with you.
Several of the galleries featured “open storage” style displays, which allow visitors to not just look at a very few items selected out to be highlighted, but rather a larger number of items, all at once. For prehistoric and other archaeologically excavated artifacts, I think this is particularly wonderful, as it gives a sense of the number/volume of items discovered, the wealth of finds, as well as the variety.
The exhibits begin, as we might expect, with the earliest periods of prehistory. I was surprised to read that, even though much evidence has been found of human settlement on “mainland” Kyushu, and in Korea, i.e. both north and south of Tsushima, going back tens of thousands of years – including some of the oldest pottery in the world, dating back roughly 10,000 years ago – no such evidence has been found on Tsushima: nothing older than about 7300 years ago. A really interesting question and mystery; surely if people found their way from the continent (Korea) to the Japanese islands so many tens of thousands of years ago, you would think they would have settled Tsushima as well. And we must remember, this is a span of tens of thousands of years we’re talking about – even if the island wasn’t settled 10,000 years ago, or if it was and then the settlement died out, why wouldn’t new people come and settle there (again) ten or a hundred or a thousand years later? Tons of time, tons of opportunities for settlements to happen – and from what little I understand, I can only presume that they did – and yet, for some reason, no evidence has yet been found. I loved the way they represented this with an empty display case, rather than with no display case at all (and just solely text).
The galleries also included a small number of videos and animation screens, and a few hands-on activities, such as getting to lift and sense the weight of an ancient (Kofun era) sword or printing your own real and imposter seals, helping make the exhibits feel, if not “innovative,” then still certainly fresh, cool, contemporary. It may be difficult to tell from these static, flat, photos, but the aesthetic mood or atmosphere in the galleries was actually very cool. It looks dark in the photos, perhaps, but it was certainly well-lit enough to make your way around, and to see everything well enough; while some museums are rather well-lit, and some dark enough (for conservation reasons) that you can’t really see the works properly, at the Tsushima Museum, the darkness functioned (for me at least) to give everything just a bit of a sense of mystery and a sort of air of impressiveness, while still being well-lit enough that you could make your way through the galleries and see the works clearly enough very easily. I quite liked the choice.
One item that was particularly interesting was this 1469 bronze temple bell. It was beautifully situated, with spotlights that really centered it and drew attention to it, and to a small bronze Buddha in the same room, making the two very clearly highlights of the exhibit. I would never have known or realized on my own, but as the gallery labels explain, this bell shows a combination of features of Japanese and Korean bells; and the labels further explain, or point out, a number of the differences in those features. Made me think back to the fact that some of the most famous historic bells in Ryukyu were made in Korea, and to want to take another look at them to see what features I can notice.
After seeing this, I then saw the famous Bridge of All Nations Bell 万国津梁鐘 on display at the Tokyo National Museum – cast in 1458, right around the same time as many of Okinawa’s most famous bells, and hung for centuries at Shuri castle, but I don’t think I ever realized before that it’s actually of Japanese, not Korean, manufacture. Brought up this photo of the gallery label from the Tsushima Museum, and was able to look at what features mark it as Japanese-style. Very interesting to be able to do. I’m certainly going to try to keep it in mind the next time I’m at the Okinawa Prefectural Museum and have the chance to see some of those bells.
Next, there was a wonderful small section talking about the use of fake seals to help allow for a greater volume of trade. This was a major element of roughly c. 14th-16th century trade in East Asia, as regional governments – China, Korea, Japan – implemented various sorts of policies around legitimate, authorized, traders having to have the proper seals, or sealed documents, to mark them as being authorized traders and not smugglers, brigands, pirates. And so, with trade being at times so narrowly limited, and localities such as Tsushima relying heavily on trade to survive or prosper, there ended up being a lot of fake seals in use.
The actual seals on display at the Tsushima Museum were all replicas, but since the Kyushu National Museum doesn’t allow photos in their galleries, this was the closest I could get to being able to photograph the seals and gallery label content about them, and I really appreciated it.
The exhibits then moved on to also display a number of documents faked by Tsushima domain in the early years of the 1600s, during what has come to be known as the Yanagawa Incident. Eager to secure rapprochement and re-initiate friendly relations between Japan and Korea (or, that is, between the Joseon royal court and the Tokugawa shogunate, with the Sо̄ house as intermediaries) in the aftermath of Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s devastating invasions of Korea in the 1590s, the Sо̄ forged a number of letters pretending to be from the shogun to the king of Korea, or vice versa. I need to read up about this more, learn more precisely the ins and outs of what happened, but in the end, if I remember correctly, Sо̄ house retainer Yanagawa Shigeoki was severely punished, but the Sо̄ were able to make like it was all his fault, done under their noses, something like that, and so they were able to keep their domain. Would have been hard for the Tokugawa to oust them, anyway, since it was the Sо̄ and the Sо̄ alone who had hundreds of years of experience and good faith in effecting relations with the Korean court. I’m not sure what role Korea might have played in actively petitioning the Tokugawa to allow the Sо̄ to stay – or not – but it’s a really interesting incident. And here we got to see on display not just some of the forged documents, but also a diagram – a sort of floor map or seating chart – showing how notable figures were arranged for the formal meeting in 1635 between Shogun Tokugawa Iemitsu, Sо̄ Yoshinari (lord of Tsushima), and Yanagawa Shigeoki, at the Shogun’s castle in Edo, to address this issue.
This last gallery in the permanent exhibits – which I didn’t realize was the last gallery, already – was dedicated to the early modern history of the island, i.e. the history of Tsushima domain, and consisted chiefly of (1) a few beautiful displays of Korean embassy procession scrolls and discussion of the role of Tsushima in effecting Korean-Japanese relations in that period, and (2) an open storage style display of pottery and other artifacts found at the former site of the Sо̄ clan castles and mansions, and elsewhere.
I feel bad to be negative, and perhaps if I were a specialist in particular other periods or aspects of the history I might, actually, have felt the same way about those sections, but as an early modernist, I have to admit I was disappointed at how small, and brief, the early modern section felt. Thinking about the Kagoshima Prefectural Museum (Reimeikan) or the Fukuoka City Museum, the volume and density of information presented at those museums about those domains’ early modern history, from domain governance and economics to demography and social organization to local culture (prominent artists, poets, writers) to a chronology or brief biographies of each of the successive lords, to discussions of notable incidents in the history… By contrast, the Tsushima Museum felt like there was so much more they could (should) cover. Felt beautifully designed, impressive, enjoyable, but just too brief.
Still, just before leaving the galleries, there was one more display that was particularly interesting, describing the Sо̄ke monjo 宗家文書, or “Documents of the Sо̄ House” – an incredible array of over 100,000 original historical documents (and other materials?) pertaining to the history of the island, and in particular to the history of the Sо̄ house, its governance of the island, and so forth. These documents are today divided up between about six different archives, with about 80,000 items now held at the Museum on Tsushima, in a newly-established (or newly rehoused, at least) Nagasaki Prefectural Research Center for History of Tsushima, about 28,000 held in Seoul, and the remainder held at the Kyushu National Museum or at various institutes & museums in Tokyo. As with other similar document collections, historians are doing tedious but fascinating, incredible, vital work at gradually transcribing and publishing these texts, reading through them and making new discoveries that deepen our understanding of not just local Tsushima history, but the history of Korea-Japan relations, the history of domain-shogunate relations, samurai culture, and so forth throughout the medieval and early modern periods.
Leaving the galleries, one is then directed to a series of small displays about individual events or aspects of Tsushima’s modern history, including the abolition of the domain and incorporation of the island into Nagasaki prefecture in 1872; the Battle of Tsushima in 1905; the wedding in 1931 of Sо̄ Takeyuki to Deokhye, the daughter of the last kind of Joseon – which is actually really interesting, and something I did not realized had happened; and the beginning of reenactments of the Korean embassies in 1980.
And then the special exhibits gallery – a beautiful small exhibit, and if I lived here or were able to visit more frequently, I’d be genuinely and eagerly excited to see what themes they might cover in future; I’m sure many of them will be quite exciting. But it’s so small! I’m not sure the current (first) special exhibit has more than 15 or maybe 20 items in it. I’m hoping that maybe they have a second or even third special exhibits gallery that could accommodate a larger exhibit, but just isn’t being used for this one. I do think, if I remember correctly, there were some signs or closed-off doors, suggesting there is more space that just wasn’t being used at the time.
The remainder of the building is a gorgeous, impressive, airy space, with much of it given over to a massive lobby and to a number of small meeting rooms, lounges, and so forth, plus of course research offices, storage, and so forth. As a visitor, I cannot help but to think it a shame that so much of this space is taken up by this grand atrium, and not by more exhibition space. But, then, what do I know?
Not sure what to say in conclusion, except that it really is a beautiful museum, and it was a pleasure to get to visit and explore Izuhara, and to finally see for myself first-hand a little bit of a taste of what this particular corner of Japan – this island situated between Japan and Korea, separated from the “mainland” islands, with its own fascinating distinct history – looks and feels like. I wish it might be easier, and cheaper, to be able to go visit again. I suppose I will keep my eyes on what temporary exhibits they’re doing in future, and try to take that as an impetus for when might be the right time to try visiting again. I hope I get to do so someday.
上り口説 Nubui Kuduchi 
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