Miyagi's Matsushima Bay, dotted with 260 pine-clad islets, ranks among Japan's three great views
Off the coast of Miyagi Prefecture, some 260 small islands covered in pine trees crowd Matsushima Bay, a scene counted among the Three Views of Japan. The same Pacific shoreline took the worst of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake, suffering more damage than any other prefecture.
Miyagi sits in the middle of the Tōhoku region of Honshu, covering 7,282 square kilometres with about 2.27 million people as of August 2023. It was once part of the old province of Mutsu. Mountains rise in the west, where the Ōu range, the longest in Japan, forms its edge, and along the northeast coast, while a broad plain spreads around Sendai, the capital and the biggest city anywhere in Tōhoku. Nearly a quarter of the land, 24 percent, is protected as natural parks.
Sendai grew up as the castle town of the warlord Date Masamune, and the ruins of his castle still overlook the city from a hill. Manufacturing now dominates around the capital, especially electronics, appliances and food processing, though the prefecture also grows plenty of rice and raises livestock. Its coastal waters are rich as well: as of March 2011, Miyagi supplied 23 percent of Japan's oysters and 15.9 percent of its sauries.
The prefecture is unusually prone to earthquakes even by Japanese standards, with large ones striking offshore often. On 11 March 2011 a magnitude 9.0 quake hit, followed by a tsunami estimated at about 10 metres along Miyagi's coast. A magnitude 7.4 tremor struck offshore on 7 April, triggering another tsunami warning, and in July the national government halted beef cattle shipments from the northeast of the prefecture over fears of radioactive contamination.
Miyagi's population grew fastest between 1940 and 1950 and is now slowly shrinking, although Sendai itself has kept gaining residents for twenty years. The prefecture also turns up often in anime and manga: it is a main setting of the volleyball series Haikyū!!, it inspired the fictional town of Morioh in JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, and Jujutsu Kaisen opens with a sign reading Miyagi Prefectural Sugisawa Third High School.
Source: Miyagi Prefecture
