Within sight of the bright lights and bustling beaches of Busan, sleepy Tsushima Island has little in common with its neighbor located a mere 50 kilometers north, but the island of about 31,000 people has recently become a hot spot for South Korean tourists.

Duty-free shops abound in the center, advertising Japanese goods in Korean, and groups of Korean tourists, day-trippers in many cases, are everywhere. The island received 356,316 Korean visitors in 2017, up 37.1 percent from the year before, making international tourism a vital source of revenue.

Tsushima, which also has a long, colorful, and often bloody history with the Korean Peninsula, made headlines for a different reason late last year when it was reported it could become the focal point of a large-scale evacuation should tensions flare between Seoul and Pyongyang.