A high-speed boat service linking South Korea's port city of Busan and Tsushima, the Japanese island that lies closest to the Korean Peninsula, resumed Saturday after a three-year lull due to the coronavirus.
The restart of the route between Busan and Hitakatsu port in Tsushima, Nagasaki Prefecture, comes amid growing hopes in both countries for increased travel to Japan's "border island."
Two South Korean operators serve the route, mostly on weekends for the time being, with the number of passengers limited to 100 per sailing. Seats on passenger ships departing Busan are fully booked until the end of next month.
"I used to go fishing at least five times a month before the pandemic," said a 63-year-old from Daejeon in the central part of South Korea who boarded a boat from Busan on Saturday morning. "I'm excited about being back for the first time in a long while."
A regular boat service between the two locations began in 1999. While a record 410,000 people visited Tsushima from South Korea in 2018, visitors plummeted the following year due to a deterioration in bilateral ties.
The boat service was suspended in April 2020 as coronavirus infections soared globally.
Panstar Group, which began serving the Busan-Tsushima route when the route was resumed, hopes to see many people use its service. "Tsushima is a nearby place for the people of Busan," Kim Bo Jung, a senior company official, said.
The Tsushima municipal government intends to consider loosening the limits on the number of passengers while keeping tabs on infection cases.
