Date Masamune: The Lord Who Sent a Ship to Rome

Sendai, Zuihoden, and the one building on this route that is actually his

伊達政宗 · 1567–1636 · last checked 2026-10-26

In 1613 a lord in the north of Japan built a European-rigged galleon on his own coast, put a retainer aboard with a letter for the Pope, and sent it across the Pacific.

It reached Acapulco. The retainer, Hasekura Tsunenaga, crossed Mexico, sailed to Spain, was received by the king, went on to Rome and was granted an audience with Paul V in 1615. He got home in 1620, to a country that had spent the seven years of his absence making his religion a capital offence.

The man who sent him was Date Masamune, and he is the reason Sendai exists.

Part 1 — A castle with no castle

Masamune was born at Yonezawa in 1567, lost the sight of his right eye to smallpox as a child, and by his early twenties had fought his way to control of most of southern Tohoku. Hideyoshi took a good deal of it back off him in 1590. After Sekigahara he was given Sendai, which at that point was a village, and in 1601 he began building the city that is there now.

The castle went on Aoba hill, above the Hirose river, with the mountains behind it and the plain in front.

He never built a keep. There is a persistent story that the shogunate would not let him, and a simpler explanation that a man who had just been given a province by a suspicious new government does not build a tower that can be seen from fifty kilometres away. Either way, what stood on the hill was a walled residence, and what is on it now is stone, a view, and a bronze horse.

Part 2 — The one that is actually his

Six years into building his city, Masamune put up a shrine on the western edge of it, using craftsmen he had brought from Kyoto and the lacquer and gold leaf of the Momoyama style at its most confident.

That building is still standing. It survived the fire that took the castle in 1882, the air raids that took most of Sendai in 1945, and the earthquakes in between, and it was designated a National Treasure in 1952.

This is the part of a Sendai itinerary that visitors routinely skip, because it is out past the baseball ground rather than on the hill with the view. It is also the only place on this route where you are looking at a building Masamune commissioned and his own eyes saw finished.

Part 3 — The mausoleum that burned

He died in 1636, in Edo, aged sixty-nine, and was brought back and buried on a wooded ridge above the Hirose. The hall his son built over the grave the following year was lacquered black and gold in the same manner as the shrine, and it was made a National Treasure in 1931.

It burned on the night of 10 July 1945, with most of the rest of Sendai.

What you climb the steps to now was finished in 1979, rebuilt from the pre-war survey drawings and photographs. It is a careful reconstruction and it is beautiful, and it is not the building that was made a National Treasure. Guidebooks are vague about this with remarkable consistency.

Part 4 — Two days, and where to sleep

Aoba hill and Osaki Hachimangu in a morning, Zuihoden in the afternoon, the city museum if you want the armour and the embassy documents. Then half an hour west into the hills.

Check rooms in Akiu for your dates

Part 5 — Fact and legend

Documented, and better than the legend: both eyes. The portrait at the top of this page shows a man with two working eyes, which Masamune did not have. It is painted that way because he left instructions that he was to be depicted whole. The painting is from about 1676, forty years after his death, by Kano Yasunobu, and the convention held: the lord with one eye is almost always shown with two.

Documented, and routinely oversold: the embassy. The ship was real, the voyage was real, the audience with the Pope was real, and diplomatically it achieved nothing at all. No trade agreement came of it. Hasekura returned to a Japan in the middle of suppressing Christianity, and died within two years. What Masamune actually wanted — trade, a Spanish alliance, leverage against Edo, or simply the prestige — is not settled by any document that survives, and anyone who tells you confidently which it was is guessing.

Retold as fact: the shogunate forbade the keep. Common in guides, thin in the record. He may have been forbidden; he may have chosen not to; the two are very hard to tell apart in 1601, and the castle burned in 1882 with whatever would have settled it.

The one people get wrong on the ground: Zuihoden is a rebuild. It says so on the site itself and almost nowhere else. If what you want is a building Masamune knew, the shrine is the answer and the mausoleum is not.

A detour, if you have a third day

He was born at Yonezawa, an hour and a half south-west, in a castle that belongs to a different story now — the Uesugi were moved into it in 1601, the same year Masamune started building Sendai, and they held it until the domains were abolished.

Before you go

Zuihoden is open 9:00 to 16:50 from February to the end of November, and 9:00 to 16:20 from December through January, with last entry twenty minutes before it shuts. It is 570 yen, and it is closed on 31 December. The Loople Sendai loop bus connects it with the castle site and the shrine, which is what makes the whole thing a comfortable day without a car.

Osaki Hachimangu has no ticket and no closing time in the way a museum does; it is a working shrine. Go in the morning if you want it quiet, and in the second week of January if you want it anything but — the Donto-sai fire festival is one of the largest in the north.

Akiu is about half an hour west of the city by bus or taxi, and the inn that matters there served the Date family and still displays a building it received from Masamune himself. That is a rarer thing than it sounds, and the full guide below says which of the nine inns are bookable in English and what they cost.