Day 15 in Japan: Uprooting a bollard on Sado

April 21, 2026

Our host saved what might have been a disastrous trip by offering to take us around a few sights in Sado on our only morning there; she even brought us a little breakfast, which was as sweet of her as it was embarrassing to us, for it became another reminder of how powerless we were on this remote island without a valid international driving permit. It had rained heavily during the night, which meant that despite the grim weather forecast, the flooded rice fields reflected blue skies and Sado’s snowy peaks as we rode towards our first stop – the Aikawa-Tsurushi gold and silver mine within the greater complex of the Sado island mines.

The Sado mines have existed for centuries, but their greatest boom took place under the aegis of the Tokugawa Shogunate in the seventeenth century, when they provided gold and silver to be traded for silk and other goods from China and farther afield. Initially, the miners in Sado were locally recruited, but as further development required greater manpower, the Shogunate began to supplement this workforce with convicted criminals from Japan’s large cities and even unemployed poor people from its streets. During the Second World War, over a thousand Koreans were forced to work in the mines. This fact is not acknowledged by the exhibits, which has caused some controversy between South Korea and Japan.

The mine museum at Sado is a shaft that has been widened and paved for visitors and leads past caves with dioramas showing how the mine operated hundreds of years ago. There is an outside component to the complex, where visitors can see some structures from the latter years of the mine’s operation, as well as the iconic cleft hill of Sado hollowed out by miners. A little farther, we followed up the steps to a little shrine in the woods. The whole excursion took us exactly one hour. From the mine, our host drove us to the Kitazawa Flotation Plant, where the precious metals were once separated from other materials.

Our ride back to the port for our two-forty ferry took us past Sado’s paddy-filled plains again. We asked our host about a building we saw on one of the snow-covered mountains rising above the landscape and she told us it was a station for picking up radio signals from North Korea. We made two more stops. The first was by the Myosen Temple, a thirteenth-century place of worship connected to Nichiren, a Buddhist monk exiled to Japan. It is notable for the high ceiling of its main hall and its elegant five-story pagoda. Our second stop was a giant golden statue of Nichiren himself. Approaching it, our host overlooked the bollards blocking the way to the complex and rammed the car straight into one of them, uprooting it and leaving a big gash next to the headlights. We were relieved to hear that she had insurance.

We caught our ferry with plenty time to spare – perhaps too much time, as Brent and Joel left the terminal with so many souvenirs that I wince to think about how they will lug them across Japan and Vietnam for another two months. When we arrived in Niigata, I took the bus to the Shinkansen and ate my last bento meal on it as the sun set over the mountains. I arrived in Tokyo at around seven and checked into my hotel for my early departure next morning. My month of travelling across Asia, from Baku to Tashkent, from Islamabad to Karachi, and from Kuala Lumpur to Tokyo, had finally reached its end.