On a clear day from Tsushima's highest points, you can see the Korean peninsula — not a distant shimmer but the actual outline of mountains, closer than the mainland of Japan. Tsushima has always sat between two countries, and for most of the Edo period its Sou clan served as the sole diplomatic intermediary between Japan and Korea. The Izuhara Hachiman Festival each October includes a reenactment of the Korean diplomatic missions: elaborately costumed figures representing the envoys who came from Seoul, processed through Tsushima, and continued toward Edo. The ceremony is not a museum piece. The people performing it are descendants of the community that did this for real, for centuries. Tsushima receives relatively few visitors, which is part of what makes the autumn festival worth attending. You will likely be one of very few non-local people in the crowd — watching a community perform a ritual for its own understanding of itself, one that has always lived between two worlds and chosen to celebrate that position.