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is the capital city of Miyagi Prefecture, the largest city in the Tōhoku region. , the city had a population of 1,097,563 in 539,698 households, and is one of Japan's 20 designated cities. The city was founded in 1600 by the daimyō Date Masamune. It is nicknamed the City of Trees; there are Japanese zelkova trees lining many of the main thoroughfares such as Jōzenji Street and Aoba Street. In the summer, the Sendai Tanabata Festival, the largest Tanabata festival in Japan, is held. In winter, the trees are decorated with thousands of lights for the Pageant of Starlight, lasting through most of December. On 11 March 2011, coastal areas of the city suffered catastrophic damage from a magnitude 9.0 offshore earthquake, which triggered a destructive tsunami. Although the Sendai area was inhabited as early as 20,000 years ago, the history of Sendai as a city begins from 1600, when the daimyō Date Masamune relocated. Masamune was not happy with his previous stronghold, Iwadeyama, which was located in the northern portion of his territories and was difficult to access from Edo (modern-day Tokyo). Sendai was an ideal location, being in the centre of Masamune's newly defined territories, upon the major road from Edo. Tokugawa Ieyasu gave Masamune permission to build a new castle in Aobayama after the Battle of Sekigahara. The previous ruler of the Sendai area had used a castle located on Aobayama. At this time Sendai was written as 千代 ("a thousand generations"), because a temple with a thousand Buddha statues used to be located in Aobayama. Masamune changed the kanji to "仙臺", which later became "仙台" (literally: "hermit/wizard" plus "platform/plateau" or figuratively, "hermit on a platform/high ground"). The character came from a Chinese poem that praised a palace created by the Emperor Wen of Han China (reigned 180–157 BCE), comparing it to a mythical palace in the Kunlun Mountains. Tradition says that Masamune chose this kanji so that the castle would prosper as long as a mountain inhabited by an immortal hermit.

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Related concepts (16)

Emishi

The Emishi (also called Ebisu and Ezo), written with Kanji that literally mean "shrimp barbarians," constituted an ancient ethnic group of people who lived in parts of Honshū, especially in the Tōhoku region, referred to as roughly "deepest part of the road" in contemporary sources. The first mention of the Emishi in literature that can be corroborated with outside sources dates to the 5th century AD, in which they are referred to as (毛人 - "hairy people") in Chinese records.

Sendai

Köppen climate classification

The Köppen climate classification is one of the most widely used climate classification systems. It was first published by German-Russian climatologist Wladimir Köppen (1846–1940) in 1884, with several later modifications by Köppen, notably in 1918 and 1936. Later, German climatologist Rudolf Geiger (1894–1981) introduced some changes to the classification system, which is thus sometimes called the Köppen–Geiger climate classification.