Cherry Blossoms and Sado Island

 April 18, 2025 Friday

After our buffet breakfast at the hotel, we looked out our window and was surprised to see a canal lined with blooming cherry blossoms!

We decided to go down and see it close up before our bus left for the next destination.

And yes, they were absolutely gorgeous!

We boarded the bus and saw more cherry blossoms on our ride to our next stop.

Tsubame-Sanjo is a stainless steel factory. We got to buy some high quality items like vegetable/noodle strainers, nail files, nail clippers and sink strainers. I'm wondering if stainless steel item prices would be going up with the Trump tariffs. Hmmm... maybe we should have bought more things. 😕

We then went to the pier to board the jet foil to take us to Sado Island.

We were provided a very lovely lunch onboard the boat for the 75 minute ride.

Once on the island, we were told about  their toki bird which is a Crested Ibis.

Wikipedia:

In the 1980s, the birds were decimated by overhunting, the use of pesticides, ongoing habitat loss, their already small population size, their limited range, winter starvation and persecution, which together brought the endangered species to the brink of extinction.

On September 25, 2008, in Sado, Niigata, the Sado Japanese Crested Ibis Preservation Center released 10 of the birds as part of its crested ibis restoration program, which aimed to introduce 60 ibises into the wild by 2015. It was the first time the bird has returned to the Japanese wild since 1981.

On June 23, 2022, nearly five hundred toki returned to Sado, where the bird's delicate pink plumage and distinctive curved beak now draw tourists. They represent a rare conservation success story when one in eight bird species globally are threatened with extinction, and one which involved international diplomacy and an agricultural revolution on a small island off Japan's west coast.

Sado Island is known to have a rather debated history. 

Mom is saying it was where prisoners were sent. 

I've read online that Koreans might have also been conscripted to work in the gold mines.

Whatever the case, it was a rather terrible place to be forced to work in order to get the gold out.

They had a bar of pure gold on display that we could try to lift. And no, there was NO way I could lift it at all.

That evening we had one of the biggest rooms we've ever stayed in when on a trip to Japan. This was a very interesting, thought provoking day.