Zuihoden

Date Masamune died in 1636 having asked to be buried on this ridge above the Hirose River, and the mausoleum went up the following year. The building you see is not that one. American incendiary bombs took the original in July 1945, along with most of central Sendai, and what stands now is a 1979 reconstruction.

It is a good one. The Momoyama style it copies is the opposite of Zen restraint: black lacquer, gold leaf, dragons and peonies carved into every bracket and painted in colours that were restored again in 2001. Nikko does the same thing on a larger scale with ten times the crowd. Here you climb sixty-odd stone steps under cedars that were too green to burn in 1945, some of them close to four hundred years old, and arrive at a single small building doing all the work.

The 1974 rebuilding gave archaeologists a chance to open the grave. They found Masamune's remains and confirmed things the chronicles only implied: he stood about 159 centimetres, was in his late sixties, and the right eye socket showed the damage that gave him the nickname the one-eyed dragon. Those findings and the excavated grave goods are in the small museum beside the mausoleum, along with a reconstruction of his face.

Two more mausoleums stand nearby for his son Tadamune and grandson Tsunamune, both plainer and both usually empty. Entry to the site is around 570 yen. The Loople Sendai tourist bus stops at the bottom of the steps, and the climb is the only demanding part. Autumn colour peaks here in the second half of November.