Sado Island Gold Mines

Sado is a volcanic island about 35 km off the coast of Niigata Prefecture, where hot water rising from below formed veins of gold and silver. A gold vein was found in 1601, the year Sado became the domain of Tokugawa Ieyasu. From 1603 the mines were run by the Sado magistrate Okubo Nagayasu.

In the early Edo period the mines are estimated to have produced more than 400 kg of gold a year, and 10,000 kan, or 37.5 tonnes, of silver are recorded as going to the shogunate each year. While mining was being mechanised elsewhere in the 17th century, extraction and smelting here stayed manual. To bail water out of the tunnels, homeless men from Edo and Osaka were sent from around 1770 and made to work as water carriers.

Western techniques arrived in the Meiji era, the mine became imperial property in 1889, and it was sold to Mitsubishi in 1896. Output peaked in 1940 at about 1,500 kg of gold, and during the Second World War workers from the Korean Peninsula also worked there. By the time mining stopped on 31 March 1989 the mine had yielded 78 tonnes of gold and 2,300 tonnes of silver. The Nishimikawa placer mine and the Aikawa-Tsurushi gold and silver mine were inscribed in 2024, and the Committee asked for interpretation covering the whole history of the property through all periods of mining.