Sendai, Japan: Gateway to Tohoku and Basho’s Road

Sendai, Japan, the largest city in the Tohoku region of the north, is a place most travellers pass through on the way to somewhere else. That is no slight. It was built to be a hinge: a castle town founded by the warlord Date Masamune at the start of the seventeenth century to hold the north, and the city where the poet Matsuo Basho paused in 1689 before turning to the coast at Matsushima. This guide covers Masamune and the city he made, the green avenues and mausoleums that survive him, what Sendai means on the road north, and how to spend a single evening there well. On our Walking Japan small group tour, Sendai is the overnight stop between the Shirakawa Barrier and the walk to the sea at Shiogama.

Date Masamune, the One-Eyed Dragon

You cannot spend an hour in Sendai without meeting Date Masamune. Born in 1567 at Yonezawa Castle, the seat of the Date clan, he lost his right eye to smallpox as a small child, and posterity gave him the name Dokuganryu, the One-Eyed Dragon. He rose to power in the last decades of Japan’s civil wars, and in 1600 sided with Tokugawa Ieyasu in the Sekigahara campaign, which opened the way to two and a half centuries of Tokugawa rule. His reward was confirmation as lord of a great northern domain. In 1601 Masamune began building a castle on Mount Aoba, above the Hirose River, and laid out the town that became Sendai.

His domain was assessed at 620,000 koku, a measure of rice yield, which made it the third largest in Edo-period Japan after Kaga and Satsuma. Masamune looked well beyond his own borders: in 1613 he sent his retainer Hasekura Tsunenaga on an embassy to Europe. A portrait of Hasekura painted in Europe, now in the Sendai City Museum, is described as the oldest known oil portrait of a Japanese person and is on UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register. Masamune died in 1636. He is said to have directed in his will that he always be depicted with both eyes, and at least one well-known statue of him in the city honours that wish.

Why is Sendai called the City of Trees?

Sendai earned the name Mori no Miyako, the City of Trees, because Masamune ordered his retainers to plant bamboo and fruit trees on their estates as a safeguard against famine and to keep stands of cedar at the edges of their land. According to the Japan Tourism Agency, that greenery shaped the character of the castle town for centuries. Much of it was lost when air raids levelled the city in 1945, but tree-lined avenues such as Jozenji-dori and Aoba-dori carry the name forward.

The castle on Mount Aoba

Very little of Masamune’s castle stands: in the Meiji period the army dismantled the innermost compound and fire destroyed most of the rest; the gate and corner tower that survived were lost in the bombing of the Second World War. What remains on the hilltop are stone walls, a 1967 replica of the Wakiyagura tower, the Gokoku Shrine dedicated to the war dead of Miyagi Prefecture, and an equestrian statue of Masamune looking out over his domain. The reason to climb is the view. From the edge of the old inner compound the whole city opens out below, with the Hirose River curving at the foot of the hill and the plain stretching away towards the coast. Mount Aoba itself was declared a National Natural Monument in 1972.

Zuihoden and the shrines of the Date lords

Masamune chose his own resting place on Kyogamine, a wooded rise across the river from the castle. His son Tadamune built the mausoleum there in 1637, the year after his death, in the lavish Momoyama style of the age: black lacquer, gold leaf and densely carved brackets painted in vivid colour. Zuihoden was designated a national treasure in 1931 and burned in the air raids of 1945. The building you see today is a reconstruction completed in 1979 and repaired in 2001 to bring it closer to the original. The approach climbs a flight of stone steps beneath tall cedars, and it is a quiet, shaded place even in summer.

Two other buildings carry Masamune’s taste. Osaki Hachimangu, a shrine built under Masamune early in the seventeenth century, has been a national treasure since 1952. Sendai Toshogu, built by Tadamune in 1654, honours Tokugawa Ieyasu, the shogun to whom the Date owed their place; it is a thoughtful counterpoint to the far grander shrine our group sees at Nikko. For the longer story of how the Date lords shaped the coast, including Zuiganji and the rose-carved mausoleum of Entsu-in, read our guide to Matsushima Bay and the islands Basho came north to see.

Sendai on Basho’s road north

When Basho set out from Edo in the spring of 1689 on the journey he would write up as Oku no Hosomichi, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, Sendai was one of the larger towns on his way. With his companion Sora, he crossed the Natori and Hirose rivers into the city and spent several days there. According to Miyagi Prefecture, he visited Aoba Castle, Toshogu and Shiogama Shrine, and wrote verse with Masamune in mind. He arrived around the festival of irises, when sweet-flag leaves were hung from the eaves of houses, and his host, a painter named Kaemon, gave him two pairs of straw sandals with cords dyed deep blue. Basho answered with a haiku about binding iris to his feet as sandal cords, a small, warm moment in a journal that is often solemn.

For Basho, Sendai was a resting place between two thresholds. Behind him lay the Shirakawa Barrier, the old gateway to the north, the point at which his journey truly began. Ahead lay the ancient stele of Taga Castle, the salt port of Shiogama and the islands of Matsushima. Our article on walking Japan in Basho’s footsteps follows the whole route from Edo to Kyoto.

What Sendai means on the Walking Japan tour

On the tour, Sendai is the end of a long Day 3. The morning begins with a walk from the Uramigataki Waterfall back to Toshogu Shrine in Nikko. A charter vehicle then carries the group about 80 kilometres to walk a section of the ancient Unohana Highway to the Shirakawa Barrier, and from the town of Shirakawa the Shinkansen bullet train covers a further 160 kilometres to Sendai, the centre of the Edo-period Date Domain, where the group stays overnight. Dinner is included that evening. Main luggage is sent ahead by courier from Tokyo on the morning of Day 2, so you carry only a daypack and are reunited with your bags in Sendai.

On the morning of Day 4, the bags go ahead again by courier, this time to Hiraizumi, and a small local train takes the group from Sendai Station to Tagajo in about 21 minutes. After an introduction to the history of Tohoku, there is time to explore the museum and the remains of Taga Castle. Founded in 724, Taga was not a castle in the later sense but the government headquarters of the northern frontier for some three centuries. Beside the site stands the Tsubo no Ishibumi, a stone almost two metres tall carved in 762 to record repairs to the fortress. Basho was deeply moved to find it still standing after nearly a thousand years. From there the group walks the road Basho took to the port of Shiogama, then boards the last Basho cruise of the afternoon for the 50-minute crossing to Matsushima, as Basho himself did by boat.

How do you get from Tokyo to Sendai?

The quickest way from Tokyo to Sendai is the Shinkansen, which the Japan National Tourism Organization notes takes about an hour and a half on the Tohoku or Akita lines. Highway buses from Tokyo and Shinjuku also run, but take five to seven hours. Sendai Station is also where the local train to Tagajo departs, so it makes a natural base for the coast.

An evening in Sendai

The tour reaches Sendai at the end of a full day of walking and travel, so an evening here is short, but much of central Sendai can be explored on foot.

Start with Jozenji-dori. Named after a long-vanished temple of Masamune’s time, its central promenade runs for about 700 metres between rows of zelkova trees, with benches and sculptures along the way, a pleasant place to stretch the legs after a day on trains. In autumn the leaves turn gold; in winter the branches are hung with lights for the Sendai Pageant of Starlight; and in September the Jozenji Street Jazz Festival fills the surrounding streets with music.

Close by are the covered shopping arcades around Ichibancho, lit by lanterns after dark and well suited to a wet evening, and Kokubuncho, often called the largest night-time district in Tohoku, which is full of restaurants. If you are in Sendai in early August, the city centre is hung with the vast paper streamers of the Sendai Tanabata Festival, one of the three great summer festivals of Tohoku. Masamune himself is credited with encouraging the custom when he founded the town.

What should you eat in Sendai?

The dish to try in Sendai is gyutan, thick slices of grilled beef tongue, which the Japan National Tourism Organization calls the local speciality. It is usually traced to a restaurant opened in 1948 by Sano Keishiro, who served beef tongue with a tail soup during the food shortages after the war, and the classic set still comes with barley rice and a bowl of that clear soup. For something sweet, look for zunda, a bright green paste of sweetened green soybeans that is the city’s other favourite flavour.

Sendai and the 2011 earthquake

On 11 March 2011, at 2.46pm, a magnitude 9.0 earthquake struck off the Pacific coast of Tohoku, and within about half an hour the first tsunami waves came ashore. In Sendai, the city centre stands well inland, but the tsunami flooded more than 4,500 hectares of the low coastal plain to the east, and many lives were lost. At Arahama Elementary School, about 700 metres from the shore, some 320 children, teachers and local residents survived by climbing to the top floor and the roof as the water reached the second storey. The school building has been preserved as a memorial and is open to the public, and the Sendai 3/11 Memorial Community Center at Arai Station on the Tozai subway line tells the story of the disaster and the rebuilding. In March 2015 the city hosted the Third UN World Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction, where member states adopted the international agreement now known as the Sendai Framework. These sites are not part of the tour itinerary, but travellers who stay on in Sendai may find a visit a sober and worthwhile morning.

Is Sendai, Japan worth an extra day?

Yes, if you want to see the Date mausoleums and the castle site at an unhurried pace. One full day covers Zuihoden, Mount Aoba and Osaki Hachimangu, and the Loople sightseeing bus links most of the major sights on a hop-on, hop-off loop. With a second day you could add the hot-spring towns of Akiu or Sakunami in the outlying mountains.

How much walking does the Sendai section of the tour involve?

The Sendai evening itself asks little of you, but the days either side are full ones. The tour is rated Activity Level 3 – Moderate to Challenging, and participants typically walk for up to five hours a day. On Day 3 that includes country paths in Nikko and the section of old highway to the Shirakawa Barrier; on Day 4 it includes time on foot at Taga Castle and the walk along Basho’s road to Shiogama, with a daypack carrying everything you need until the bags catch up.

Sendai does not need to compete with Kyoto or Tokyo. Its interest lies in what it joins together: the frontier of Taga Castle and the Edo-period domain of the Date lords, the inland road from Shirakawa and the coast at Matsushima, Basho’s journal and the modern city that has rebuilt itself more than once. On the Walking Japan small group tour, a group of up to 16 travellers with an Odyssey Program Leader arrives here by bullet train at the end of the day and leaves the next morning on foot towards the sea, much as Basho did.