🚅 Sendai 仙台

12th April 2025

Sendai is about 360 km north of Tokyo - that's about 21/2 hours with the Tohoku Shinkansen (bullet train). First, I give myself plenty of time to navigate Tokyo station...........

忙しい旅行者。東京駅

and find my platform........

A Shinkansen glides in smoothly........

The smartly dressed cleaners are ready with rubbish bags (holding them out to passengers as they disembark). One has a small hoover. Announcements are made. A civilised queue waits on the platform. When I think of Frankfurt Station....no...don't..

If you are not sure which is your train just get on the one which is going at the time published. It will be the right one....

印象的な

A cool wind greets me as I step out of the train at Sendai a few hours later. I walk to my hotel, crossing the bus lanes and other traffic on high overhead pedestrian bridges. I'm not good at heights, but the hotel 8th floor is bearabIe. It could be worse........

It's only early afternoon, so I decide to walk to the castle (or what's left of it).....It was a stiff climb, but well worth it......

At the top, Masamune Date, the powerful feudal lord of Sendai, glares out imperiously over the countryside and the sea....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_Masamune

He chose a good site for his castle, I must say.....

Add a few early blossoms and he doesn't look quite so fierce.....

At important historical sites in Japan you will often see these great cedars - more of them anon....

Sendai is not really a tourist destination, but the place is a-buzz. Come evening and the Izakayas (pubs) and restaurants are heaving with young people eating, drinking, talking animately and laughing. Whilst outside the buses and taxis and cars seem to weave past on a sort of smooth wave........

A shopping mall.....

The next day I used the circular bus route which links most of the historical sites around the city. The old feudal lords of Japan always found good spots to be laid to rest ( a prime example is the last Shogun's -Tokugawa Ieyasu - shrine in Nikko, Tochigi ). The lord of the Tohoku region was no exception - Masamune Date. His mausoleum - the Zuihoden, originally built in 1636, is a blaze of extravangant colour unlike anywhere else in Japan. You start first with a modest temple in a small garden....

It's a stiff climb up to the mausoleum itself.....(the more important the ruler, the tougher the climb. Well that's my experience).

You pass the Nirvana gateway (as all good Buddhists know, Nirvana means reaching a state of enlightenment where worldly desires are no longer an issue and you escape the cycle of birth and rebirth)...........

The mausoleum......

The adjoining museum, which has relics of the pre -1945 original.......

It may disappoint Europeans to learn that this whole complex is actually a replica of the original. But this doesn't seem to worry the Japanese. There are colour postcards of the place pre -1945, and it looks exactly the same. Obviously the Americans wanted to destroy the port of Sendai, but fire bombing a 17thc. historical site, way outside the city?

Leaving the precincts of the areal I took a woodland walk back down the hill.

At one point I came across a graveyard for children of the ruling classes....

I know I'm getting on.......

...but some of these cedars are about 380 years old....

Before I left for Sendai there was a job to do. I have a little friend who has just discovered the joys of pulling a bow across a string. But she is still not yet 3 years old! So do I have a violin small enough for her? As luck would have it, yes - and it was easy to smuggle it into the overhead locker on the plane. Time to do a delivery in Sagamihara...

Making someone happy. Is that not one of the greatest joys there is?