THE CARMEN BLACKER Lecture Senes honours the memory and scholarship of Carmen Blacker (1924—2009). Each year a senior scholar delivers a lecture on a theme related to Japanese religion or folklore, the focus of her academic career at the University of Cambridge.

The island of Tsushima lies in the strait between the Korean peninsula and Japan, and it is in fact rather closer to Korea than to Japan. Fukuoka in northern Kyushu is sixty miles away and it takes five hours by boat. There is a tiny airport with an alarmingly short runway but the approach by sea gives a better sense of how remote Tsushima was from the mainland in the past. Although the city of Pusan in Korea can easily be seen from Tsushima, when Tsushima is viewed from Japan nothing can be seen but haze.

Tsushima was originally just one island but the construction of canals in 1671 and 1900 has turned it into a string of islands some seventy kilometres long and fifteen kilometres wide. Administratively the islands belong to Nagasaki Prefecture and in 2004 the various townships which constituted the island were amalgamated to turn the entire island into Tsushima City, with the administrative offices located in Izuhara, the largest town on the island. This process, whereby villages and towns amalgamate to form new cities has been duplicated all over Japan and, while it results in financial and administrative advantages for the new cities, they remain artificial entities spread over wide areas, as is the case with Tsushima. Furthermore, it is a city with a small and declining population. In 1960 there were around seventy thousand inhabitants but the figure has already dropped to less than half of that.

Partly because it is remote and on the margins of Japan proper, Tsushima has had an interesting and at times important role to play in Japanese history. In spite of its remoteness and proximity to Korea, Tsushima's integration into the politics and the economy of Japan is of very long standing, going back at least to the seventh century. The imposing remains of the Kanedayama mountain fortress, which was constructed in 667, bear witness to the Yamato state's fear of an invasion by Tang China and the Korean kingdom of Silla after the Japanese defeat in 663 at the battle of Paekgang in Korea (known in Japanese as the battle of Hakusukmoe).