Japan · Tohoku
Sendai
Date Masamune's castle town, the best beef tongue in Japan, and the whole of Tohoku inside an hour of the platform.
Sendai is the one big city in Tohoku and the door everyone comes through on the way north, a million people spread across a river plain of wide, tree-lined avenues an hour and a half from Tokyo by shinkansen. Date Masamune laid it out in 1600 and the city still trades on his legend, though the firebombing of 1945 took the centre and the rebuilt grid is modern; the old things stand at the edges, up on the castle bluff and in the hills. Most people come for the food, which is genuinely its own rather than borrowed from anywhere else, and for what sits within an hour in every direction: a bay of pine islands, a cliff temple, hot spring valleys, and the coast the 2011 tsunami rewrote.
Suggested stay
2–3 days
Language
Japanese
Currency
JPY
Timezone
UTC+9
Why you'll love Sendai
Food dishes the city invented rather than inherited - charcoal-grilled beef tongue with barley rice and oxtail soup, sweet green edamame paste on mochi and in milkshakes, and fish cake pressed into the shape of a bamboo leaf
City of trees zelkova boulevards that close over into green tunnels through summer and are strung with lights in December, with a river gorge and parkland inside the centre
A base, not a bottleneck pine-island bays, a cliff-top temple of a thousand steps, kokeshi-carving spa towns and a golden hall in the woods are all a short train ride out
Room to breathe a million people, none of the crush of the big three, the biggest night district north of Tokyo, and money that goes further than it does further south
Best time to visit
Apr, Nov
14-16° days
38.268° N, 140.869° E
UTC+9 · Asia/Tokyo
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Weather & when to go to Sendai
Month by month: typical highs and lows, rainfall and rain days.
✓ Best Apr, Nov
Watch for Jul-Oct typhoons risk
Cards tinted by calculated verdict · big number = typical daily high, small = low · hover for conditions
When to avoid Sendai
Jan and Feb are the hard months here - a raw wind runs down the plain, the trees the city is named for are bare, and the light is gone by mid-afternoon. They are also the peak of the mountain season an hour west, when the ski fields are running and the frozen firs draw photographers from the whole country, and the middle of January brings the year's biggest fire festival, so a good many people take the cold deliberately.
Top things to do in Sendai
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Zuihoden - Date Masamune's mausoleum in the cedars
history 👍 PopularA short climb through old cedars to the lacquered, gilded and brightly carved tomb of the lord who founded the city, built in the Momoyama style he had grown up with rather than the sober taste of his own century. The original burned in the 1945 air raid; the rebuild followed the excavation of the tomb in the 1970s, and the small museum below shows what came out of it, including the reconstructed face of the man himself. Two more Date lords lie in quieter halls along the same ridge.
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Sendai Castle ruins - stone walls and the whole city below
history 👍 PopularAoba Castle sat on a bluff between a gorge and a forest and never needed a keep, which is roughly why nothing is left but the enormous curved stone walls, a reconstructed guard tower and the bronze Masamune on horseback in his crescent-moon helmet. Come for the view: the plain, the river and the sea laid out beneath you, best in the last hour of daylight. The loop bus saves you the hill.
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Gyutan - charcoal-grilled beef tongue, invented in this city
food ⭐ Highly recommendedA postwar Sendai cook made thick-sliced salted beef tongue over binchotan into a set meal with barley rice, oxtail soup and pickled chilli, and the city has run on it ever since. It is chewy, smoky and nothing like the thin sheets of tongue on a yakiniku grill. Whole streets of specialists compete on thickness and salting, and there is a floor of rival counters inside the station if your train is the only window you have.
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Sendai Tanabata - the paper streamers over the arcades
culture arts 👍 PopularFor three days in early August the covered shopping streets disappear under thousands of handmade washi and bamboo streamers, some of them several metres long, hung so low you walk through them. It is one of the three great festivals of Tohoku and the single busiest thing that happens in the city; the weather is hot and sticky and nobody minds. Book a bed months out or stay down the line.
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Osaki Hachimangu - the black-lacquered shrine on the hill
historyMasamune's own shrine, finished in 1607 and one of very few buildings in the city old enough to be a National Treasure: black lacquer, gold fittings and dense colour under a steep shingled roof, up a long stone stair among the trees. In the middle of January its grounds hold the city's fire festival, when the New Year decorations are burned and a procession of men in loincloths walks through the cold to the flames.
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Jozenji-dori - the zelkova boulevard the city is named for
scenicA four-lane avenue with a wide planted median down the middle, arched over by zelkova until it reads as a tunnel of leaves; the sculptures, benches and open-air cafes along it are where Sendai actually spends its evenings. A street jazz festival fills it in September, and through December the bare trees carry a canopy of lights that is the winter reason to be here. Toyo Ito's Mediatheque, a stack of glass floors held up by twisting steel tubes, sits on the same street and is free to wander.
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Zunda, sasa-kamaboko and the rest of the Sendai plate
foodZunda is young edamame mashed with sugar into a bright green paste, spread on mochi and blended into shakes that people queue for at the station. Add sasa-kamaboko, a grilled fish cake shaped like a bamboo leaf and sold hot from the counter; Sanriku oysters and sea squirt off the coast north of here; a strong local miso; and hiyashi chuka, the cold summer ramen a Sendai kitchen is credited with inventing.
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Ichibancho and Kokubuncho - arcades by day, Tohoku's night by dark
nightlife music shoppingA cross of long covered shopping arcades runs through the middle of town, dry in any weather and busy until late, and immediately west of it Kokubuncho packs the biggest concentration of bars, izakaya and clubs anywhere north of Tokyo into a few dense blocks. The hostess-bar end has touts working the pavement after dark; the izakaya lanes closer to the arcades are the easy half to drink in.
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Akiu Onsen - a waterfall and a gorge inside the city limits
nature wildlife ⭐ Highly recommendedA hot spring valley half an hour west, still technically Sendai, where the Date lords took their baths and day visitors now come for two things: Akiu Otaki, a wide curtain of water dropping into a wooded bowl, and the Rairaikyo gorge, a narrow slot of green water with a short walkway cut along the rim. Ryokan here open their baths to non-residents, and the whole valley turns in late October and early November.
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Sendai Daikannon - the white Kannon over the northern suburbs
culture artsA hundred-metre statue in white, holding a wish-granting jewel, visible from half the city and startling the first time you notice it above the rooftops. You go inside: a lift takes you up through floors ringed with rank upon rank of small Buddhist figures, and you walk back down past them. It sits out in Izumi ward, so pair it with a subway ride rather than a walk.
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Arahama Elementary School - the tsunami ruin left standing
historyThe coastal district of Arahama was swept away on 11 March 2011 and its four-storey school was one of the few structures left; several hundred residents survived on its upper floors and roof until helicopters lifted them off. The building is now kept open as it was found, with the water line marked on the second floor, photographs of the neighbourhood before and after, and a model of the streets that are now empty ground. It is a sober hour and the most honest thing in the city.
Best areas to stay in Sendai
$ Budget $$ Mid-range $$$ Premium
Sendai Station
Rail-side base $$Business hotels stacked around the shinkansen
Explore hotels in Sendai Station →
Ichibancho & Kokubuncho
Food & nightlife $$Covered arcades and the night district
Explore hotels in Ichibancho & Kokubuncho →
Jozenji-dori & Kotodai
Quiet & central $$Leafy boulevard, parks and galleries
Explore hotels in Jozenji-dori & Kotodai →
Akiu Onsen
Onsen night $$$Hot spring ryokan in a river valley
Explore hotels in Akiu Onsen →
Live nightly prices from Booking.com, Agoda and others, centred on Sendai
Getting to & around Sendai
Getting there
Tohoku Shinkansen from Tokyo in about an hour and a half, or fly into Sendai Airport and take its own train line into the centre
Flight
Sendai Airport (SDJ)
About 18 km south of the centre on the coast at Natori, with the Sendai Airport Access Line running from beneath the terminal into Sendai Station in roughly 20 to 25 minutes. It handles domestic flights plus a short list of regional routes to Korea, Taiwan and China; the terminal was inundated by the 2011 tsunami and rebuilt, and the ground floor still carries a marker showing how high the water came.
Train
Sendai Station
The Tohoku Shinkansen is the main artery: about an hour and a half from Tokyo on the fastest Hayabusa services, continuing north to Morioka, Aomori and on to Hokkaido. Local JR lines fan out from the same station to the coast, the hills and Yamagata.
Coach
Sendai Station east side
Daytime and overnight highway buses run from Tokyo, Yokohama, Niigata and across Tohoku; slower than the train and the standard cheap alternative to it
Ferry
Sendai Port
A long-distance ferry links Nagoya and Tomakomai in Hokkaido with the port northeast of the city; an overnight crossing rather than a shortcut, and a good way to arrive with a car or motorbike
Drive
The Tohoku Expressway runs past the city between Tokyo and Aomori; a car earns its keep only for the mountain roads and the onsen valleys, not for the city itself
Getting around
Walking
The station, the arcades, the boulevard and the night district sit inside a flat core you can cross in about twenty minutes
Free
Subway
Two lines cross at Sendai Station: Namboku running north to south, Tozai east to west out towards the university, the castle side and the coastal memorial district
TBC
Loople Sendai loop bus
A retro-styled sightseeing loop tying the station to the castle bluff, the mausoleum and the museums, which is the painless way up the hill
TBC
City buses
Cover everything the subway misses, including the run out to Akiu Onsen; board at the rear, take a numbered ticket and pay as you get off, or tap a card
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Local JR lines
The Senseki line follows the coast to Matsushima and Ishinomaki, the Senzan line climbs west to Yamadera and Yamagata; both are how most day trips are done
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Taxi
Plentiful at the station and outside the arcades, and the sane option late at night when the subway has stopped
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Day trips from Sendai
Matsushima
Half dayPine-island bay
Counted for centuries as one of the three great views of Japan: a shallow bay scattered with hundreds of pine-topped limestone islets, crossed by sightseeing boats and by red bridges out to the nearer islands. Zuiganji, the Date family temple, keeps gilded rooms and meditation caves cut into the rock behind it, and the oysters here are the best reason to eat lunch slowly. The islands blunted the 2011 wave and the town came through far better than the coast on either side.
Getting there
train | ferry | car
About 40 min by JR Senseki line to Matsushima-Kaigan, or by cruise boat across the bay from Shiogama
Yamadera
Half dayCliffside temple
Risshakuji clings to a wooded cliff over a valley in Yamagata, reached by a stone stairway of about a thousand steps through cedars and rock-cut shrines to a small hall on a ledge with the whole valley beneath it. Basho stopped here on his walk north and wrote the cicada-and-stillness haiku every Japanese schoolchild learns. The steps ice up in midwinter, and the valley is worth the climb again in late autumn.
Getting there
train | walk | car
About 1 hr by JR Senzan line, then a thousand stone steps
Hiraizumi
Full dayGolden hall in the woods
The northern Fujiwara built a rival capital here in the twelfth century and left the Konjikido, a small hall sheathed inside and out in gold leaf and mother-of-pearl, now sheltered within a concrete outer building. Motsuji next door keeps a Pure Land garden laid out around a pond that has barely changed in eight hundred years. The whole site is UNESCO-listed and a quiet counterweight to Kyoto.
Getting there
train | bus | car
About 40 min by shinkansen to Ichinoseki, then a short local train
Naruko Onsen
Full daySpa town and gorge
A steaming hot spring town in the hills, famous for its sulphurous public baths and for kokeshi, the slim painted wooden dolls turned on lathes in workshops you can watch. Just outside it the Naruko gorge drops away beneath a road bridge, and the view down into it once the maples turn in October is one of the standard images of Tohoku.
Getting there
train | bus | car
About 1 hr by shinkansen to Furukawa, then the Rikuu East line
Zao
Full dayVolcano and ski mountain
The mountain has two seasons and they barely overlap. From late spring to autumn the Echo Line road runs over the top to Okama, a crater lake that turns green in the sun; the road is shut under snow from around November to April, so a fine forecast is no help in winter. From late January into February the ropeway on the Yamagata side runs up into the juhyo, fir trees frozen into white monsters, with lit night runs and the region's best-known ski slopes underneath them.
Getting there
bus | train | car | tour
1-2 hr by bus or train and bus, depending on the season and which side you approach from
Ishinomaki and Onagawa
Full dayRebuilt tsunami coast
The port city took some of the heaviest losses of 2011 and has spent the years since rebuilding on raised ground, with a manga museum on an island in the river honouring the local-born creator of the masked-hero comics and his characters posted along the streets. Onagawa further out rebuilt its whole centre around a new station and a promenade of small shops running down to the water, and its seafood is the point of going.
Getting there
train | bus | car
About 1 hr 20 min by JR Senseki line to Ishinomaki
A little history of Sendai
The Yamato state pushed its frontier into this plain long before the city existed, planting the fort and provincial headquarters of Tagajo just north of here in 724 to hold the border against the Emishi. Sendai proper begins with Date Masamune, the one-eyed warlord who backed the winning side at Sekigahara, took a ridge above the Hirose River in 1600 and laid a castle town out beneath it the following year. His ambition ran a long way past his domain: in 1613 he sent his retainer Hasekura Tsunenaga across the Pacific to Mexico, Spain and Rome in a ship built on his own coast, an embassy that came home seven years later to a country busy shutting Christianity out. What Masamune built survived him as a plan - a grid of samurai quarters under a wooded bluff, with trees planted through it, which is where the nickname city of trees comes from.
The domains were abolished in 1871 and Sendai became the seat of Miyagi Prefecture and the administrative and military centre of the north. On 10 July 1945 an American incendiary raid burned out most of the central city and killed over a thousand people; the mausoleum, then a National Treasure, went with it, and the wide boulevards date from the rebuilding that followed. On 11 March 2011 a magnitude 9.0 earthquake off the Sanriku coast shook the city hard and sent a tsunami across the flat coastal wards, destroying the districts of Arahama and Yuriage, flooding the airport and killing around nine hundred people within the city and close to twenty thousand along the wider coast. The inland centre stood, and Sendai became the base for the region's recovery; in 2015 it hosted the UN conference that produced the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, the agreement that now carries the city's name in disaster policy worldwide.
Tagajo fort is founded just north of the modern city as the frontier headquarters of Mutsu province
Date Masamune begins Aoba Castle on the bluff above the Hirose River
The castle town is laid out below it and takes the name Sendai
Osaki Hachimangu is completed in black lacquer and gold, and still stands
Masamune sends Hasekura Tsunenaga across the Pacific to Mexico, Spain and Rome
Zuihoden is built on the ridge as Masamune's mausoleum, the year after his death
The domains are abolished and Sendai becomes the seat of Miyagi Prefecture
Sendai is incorporated as a city
The 10 July air raid burns out the centre and destroys the Zuihoden mausoleum
Zuihoden is rebuilt, following the excavation of Masamune's tomb five years earlier
The Namboku subway line opens, the first in Tohoku
The 11 March Tohoku earthquake and tsunami destroy the city's coastal districts and flood the airport
The Tozai subway line opens, and the city hosts the UN conference that adopts the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction
Know before you go
Payment
Cards & cash mixed
English
Limited
Wifi
Reliable
Power
Type A / B
100 V, 50/60 Hz
Dialing
+81
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FAQs about Sendai
▸ When is the best time to visit Sendai?
April and November are the pick of the year, the first for blossom in the parks and along the castle bluff, the second for colour in the gorges and hot spring valleys just outside the city. Early August is the other reason to come and has nothing to do with comfort: the Tanabata festival buries the arcades in paper streamers in hot, humid weather and fills every bed in the prefecture. December strings the boulevard with lights. January and February are cold, raw and short on daylight, and they are exactly when the ski fields and the frozen firs an hour west are at their best, and when the big fire festival is held.
▸ How many days do you need in Sendai?
One full day covers the city itself - the mausoleum, the castle bluff, the boulevard and a long dinner. Two or three make more sense, because the point of being here is what is within an hour: Matsushima and Yamadera are half days each, and Hiraizumi, Naruko or Zao fill a whole one.
▸ What should you eat in Sendai?
Gyutan first: thick-cut charcoal-grilled beef tongue with barley rice and oxtail soup, a dish this city invented and does better than anywhere. Then zunda, sweet mashed edamame on mochi or blended into a shake; sasa-kamaboko fish cake grilled at the counter; oysters and sea squirt from the Sanriku coast; the local miso; and Miyagi sake, which is among the best rice-growing sake in the country.
▸ Is Sendai worth visiting, or just a stop on the way north?
Be honest about it: the city's own sight list is short, because the 1945 raid took most of what was old, and a day covers it. What makes it worth a stop is that it is the only place in Tohoku with a full-size city's food, nightlife and hotels, sitting on the shinkansen with the region's best days out inside an hour. Come for the base and the eating, not for a dense set of monuments.
▸ Can you visit the tsunami-affected coast from Sendai?
Yes, and it is straightforward. The preserved Arahama elementary school in the city's coastal ward is kept open as it was found and explains what happened to the district around it, and a small memorial centre near the eastern end of the Tozai subway line does the same with photographs and local testimony. Further out, Yuriage and the rebuilt ports of Ishinomaki and Onagawa are day trips. These are living places and working memorials rather than attractions, so go quietly.
▸ Does it snow much in Sendai?
Less than people expect. Sendai sits on the Pacific side, so its winters are cold, dry and often clear, with a handful of snowfalls that rarely lie for long in the centre. The mountains an hour west are the opposite, buried deep enough to run some of the country's best-known ski terrain, which is why winter here means going up rather than staying in town.
▸ Is Sendai expensive?
Cheaper than Tokyo, Kyoto or Osaka on hotels and eating out, and the business-hotel cluster around the station keeps rooms competitive outside festival week. Early August is the exception, when Tanabata pushes rates up and fills the city months ahead. Walking the arcades, the boulevard and the castle bluff costs nothing.
▸ Do you need a car in Sendai?
No. Two subway lines, the loop bus and the JR lines out of the station cover the city and every major day trip. A car only helps for the onsen valleys and the mountain road over Zao to the crater lake, and that road is shut through the snow months anyway.
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