Sendai
— — a city held under tall zelkovas.
Not only on a wall.
“Sendai is the city Date Masamune laid out in 1601, and the tall zelkova trees along Jozenji-dori and Aoba-dori are why people call it Mori no Miyako — the city of trees. The avenues run wide and green; the trams are long gone but the cadence of the place feels older than its rebuilt centre. In early August the streets fill with paper streamers for Tanabata, the largest of its kind in Japan, and the colour holds for three days before the rain washes it out. from the studio
Sendai, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Sendai is the capital of Miyagi Prefecture and the largest city of the Tohoku region, with a population near 1.1 million. It sits on a coastal plain between the Ou Mountains and the Pacific, about 350 kilometres north of Tokyo on the Tohoku Shinkansen. The modern city was founded in 1600-1601 by the daimyo Date Masamune, who built Aoba Castle on the bluff above the Hirose River. The grid of broad tree-lined avenues at the centre is a legacy of post-war reconstruction after heavy bombing in July 1945.
Sendai Tanabata runs 6 to 8 August each year and is the largest Tanabata festival in Japan, drawing more than two million visitors. Local shops and neighbourhoods hand-make the long bamboo-pole streamers — seven traditional kinds, each with a meaning — and hang them from the arcades of Ichibancho and Chuo-dori. The festival traces to the early Edo period under Date Masamune and was revived in its current form in 1928. A fireworks display on the Hirose River opens the run the evening before.
The Loople Sendai sightseeing bus loops the central sights from Sendai Station every twenty minutes for a flat single-ride fare. The main stops are Zuihoden, the gold-and-vermilion mausoleum of Date Masamune rebuilt in 1979 after wartime loss; the Aoba Castle ruins with the bronze mounted statue of Masamune above the city; and the Sendai City Museum at the foot of the bluff. Allow a full day. The coast at Arahama and the Sendai Arahama Elementary School memorial mark the line of the March 2011 tsunami, twenty minutes east by car.