About Sendai City Museum
The Sendai City Museum, the main museum in Sendai, the capital of Miyagi Prefecture, Japan, first opened in 1961 and was rebuilt in 1986 on the same site, with a reconstructed floor space of 18,000 square meters. The museum contains many materials on the history of Sendai and is historically important for studying the cultural life of Sendai in the past. The museum is surrounded by beautiful and green surroundings and has a cultural atmosphere.
The Sendai City Museum is a museum that focuses on the preservation, display and study of Sendai’s history and materials donated by the Date Family (Date). The Date Family was a famous Japanese samurai family, descended from the Fujiwara clan’s Sanin Ryu, and was an important local daimyo in Tohoku from the Kamakura period to the Edo period, and is still well known in the region.
The museum has a collection of about 80,000 pieces of valuable materials, especially the materials of the envoys sent to Europe during the Keicho period (Japan’s chronology), which have been classified as national treasures of Japan. In addition to the regular exhibitions, the Sendai City Museum sometimes exhibits the armor used by Date Masamune, as well as the costumes and accessories he wore on his visits to Rome, which are very valuable.
How to get there
3 min walk from Kokusai Centre.
Sendai Station (Sendai Station, Bus Stop 15-3, City Loop Bus “Loople Sendai”, approx. 20 mins)
→In front of Museum/International Centre
The museum was opened in 1961 on the site of Sendai Castle San-no-Maru for the storage, exhibition and research of materials donated by the Date family in 1951 (cultural property donated by the Date family). In 1986, the museum was completely rebuilt on the same site, where it remains to this day.
The museum houses about 90,000 items, including the national treasure of materials related to the Keicho envoys to Europe, which are related to Shikura Tsunenaga. Goshiki-numa, near the entrance, is known as the place where figure skating was first performed in Japan and is the ‘Cradle of Japanese Figure Skating’, where a monument stands.