Miyagi Hidden Gems

Sendai is the only city in Tohoku with a million people, and it was designed to be a city from the start: Date Masamune laid it out around his castle in the early 1600s with unusually wide avenues, and the zelkova trees later planted along Jozenji-dori are why it is called the city of trees. That planning is what makes Miyagi work as a base — you can sleep somewhere with a proper restaurant scene and still be at the coast in half an hour. Matsushima Bay, a scatter of a couple of hundred pine-topped islets, sits on that half-hour line, and the islands absorbed enough of the 2011 wave that the town behind them came through comparatively intact. Further north the Sanriku coast did not, and the raised ground and new seawalls are visible from the train. Inland the land climbs to Naruko, a gorge and hot-spring town where several distinct kinds of spring water surface within a few kilometres.