Date Masamune's castle grid still trees Sendai's main streets
Sendai, Miyagi's capital and the largest city in Tōhoku, held 1,098,335 people in August 2023, twelfth in Japan. The warlord Date Masamune founded it in 1600, and zelkova trees along Jōzenji and Aoba streets earn it the nickname City of Trees, a reputation that began with feudal household forests.
Masamune disliked his old stronghold at Iwadeyama, stuck in the north of his lands and awkward to reach from Edo. After Sekigahara, Tokugawa Ieyasu let him build on Aobayama, central to his new domain and on the main road from the capital. Work on the castle began in December 1600 and on the town in 1601, and today's downtown grid follows his layout. The castle stood beside the Hirose River, which served as a moat and flooded often until dams and levees came in the 1960s and 1970s.
The tree tradition predates modern planning: the feudal domain urged residents to plant gardens, so homes, temples and shrines kept small household forests for timber and everyday materials. Modern links came quickly. The railway to Tokyo opened in 1887, bringing the capital within a day's travel; Tohoku Imperial University, founded in 1907, became the first Japanese university to admit women in 1913; and in 1925 the Senseki Line's approach to Sendai Station became Japan's first underground railway segment, two years ahead of Tokyo's Ginza Line.
War and earthquakes have repeatedly reshaped the city. The locally recruited 2nd Infantry Division fought at Guadalcanal, and an American raid on 10 July 1945 burned much of the centre, killing 2,755 people and destroying 11,933 houses. The 1978 Miyagi earthquake spurred Japan's current building standards, and offshore quakes of this type recur every 25 to 40 years. In March 2011 the tsunami ran about 8 kilometres inland, wrecking the airport and closing the port until mid-April.
The city covers 788 square kilometres from the Pacific to the Ōu Mountains, topped by Mount Funagata at 1,500 metres, and unusually for a big coastal city its core sits on a terrace 40 to 60 metres up. Its summer Tanabata festival is Japan's largest.
Source: Sendai
