We discovered this quaint little country train platform near Kisarazu in Chiba last summer.
This is the whole thing - no ticket gate or anything.

The train system in Japan is legendary. I love the contrast between this tiny station and Shinjuku station in Tokyo, which boasts of having 36 platforms, over 200 exits, and an average of 3.64 million people using it daily!

Everyone loves Sado Island!

The jet-foil ferry from Niigata to Sado Jima.  It was an amazingly smooth ride!

The members of the Sado Branch.

The Branch President - a wonderful, hard-working fisherman of both fish and men.

This is NOT Tokyo!

What a beautiful place to air out your futons!

In July, we acquired the beautiful island of Sado in our mission, which used to be part of the Sendai Mission.  Its been a few years since they have had missionaries on the island, but just this week, we sent three lucky elders there. These pictures were taken in August.

 August 27, 2013 We received one new sister off-transfer.  We had been anxiously waiting for her to arrive, and she finally made it, after waiting for her passport for several weeks.

She was trained quickly and well by these two wonderful sisters.

We only had one returning missionary this transfer. 

We were sad to see him go, but his mom was very happy to come and get him!

 29 New Missionaries arrived in September.
This group can really sing - wish you could hear them!

Our newest group with their fabulous trainers.

We now have 161 missionaries in the entire mission, 114 of whom have been here less than six months.
(Do the math - that's about 70%!)