Watching the latest Ghost of Tsushima gameplay stream made me curious to know about what types of settlements there might be in the game.
I tried searching for more information on this but I couldn't find any. Did Tsushima Island have any cities/urban areas during the time period that the game is set on (The first Mongol invasions of Japan in 1274)?
The only information I could find about Tsushima Island during that time period was that it was an important trading center that traded with other Japanese islands and the Goryeo kingdom.
Unlikely, though this would depend on your definition of "cities/urban areas". In written sources we have three points of data:
The Book of Wei says there's no good farm and the population lived on fishing, so they were probably spread out across coastal villages. By William Farris' numbers the pre-Sengoku Japan could support about 1.8% of the population being soldiers at maximum. If we assume each horse had a follower on foot, (it's an average between 12, I'm taking 1 to account for the fact that some of them wouldn't be from Tsushima), that makes maybe 160 soldiers from Tsushima which would put the population at about 9,000. Even if we assume half of that lived at the Tsushima provincial capital (and I highly doubt it was that high), the capital would still be below 5,000 people, the cut-off that Faris use for the population of a town. The capital being a town of 5,000 is a possibility, though I don't expect it to have had any more than 24,000 people.
On the other hand the "horse" counter ki is often used to mean all soldiers, which would make the island's population below 5,000. This would mean any population center could have been smaller than Neolithic Jericho.
Note today Tsushima's population is only 30,000. While there has been significant decrease due to aging population and urbanization, the island's population didn't break 70,000 at maximum in the 1960s.