Sendai
Founded by the one-eyed lord Date Masamune in 1601. The 2011 tsunami killed 19,000+ regionally and devastated Sendai's coast; reconstruction cost exceeded $200B. The Sendai Framework for disaster risk reduction was adopted by all UN member states.
Date Masamune, the one-eyed samurai lord, founded Sendai in 1601 by building a castle on Aoba Hill and ordering his retainers to settle the plain below. In 1613, he dispatched Hasekura Tsunenaga on a seven-year diplomatic mission to Spain and the Vatican—the last Japanese to visit Europe before the Tokugawa shogunate sealed the country for 250 years. Masamune's ambition to build an independent trading relationship with Europe failed, but the city he founded became the dominant settlement of northeastern Honshu.
The 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami struck Sendai's coastal districts with devastating force. The magnitude 9.0 quake—Japan's most powerful recorded—generated waves exceeding 10 metres that penetrated up to 10 kilometres inland along the Sendai plain. Over 19,000 people died across the region; Sendai's port was destroyed, its airport submerged, and entire coastal communities erased. The disaster functioned as a phase transition: the city that existed before 11 March 2011 was structurally different from what followed.
Reconstruction cost exceeded ¥32 trillion ($210 billion) nationally. Sendai rebuilt its coastal zones with elevated seawalls, relocated communities to higher ground, and designated former residential areas as memorial parks and disaster-preparation zones. The UN World Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction convened in Sendai in 2015, producing the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, adopted by all UN member states. The city transformed catastrophe into institutional authority.
Sendai's 1.1 million residents anchor a metropolitan economy generating approximately ¥5.3 trillion ($35 billion). Tohoku University, founded in 1907 as Japan's third imperial university, employs over 10,000 staff and drives a research economy specializing in materials science and disaster engineering. Like Pacific salmon returning to their natal stream after years at sea, Sendai's residents rebuilt on the same ground the tsunami had scoured—driven by attachment to place that transcends rational risk assessment. The city functions as a regional capital for six prefectures with a combined population of 8.5 million—a primate city pattern where one settlement dominates its hinterland by providing services no other can match.