The recent Magnitude 7.4 earthquake off Fukushima Prefecture was thankfully not as severe as the catastrophic 2011 triple disaster. It was, however, still very destructive, with damage estimated between 2 and 4 billion USD, 4 dead and 225 injured. And a particularly visible bit of damage in Sendai was to the famed equestrian statue of Date Masamune atop the Aoba Castle walls. Video footage and on-site photography shortly after the earthquake showed the statue leaning and one of the horse’s hooves cracked, along with some parts of the castle walls collapsed.
Statues are objects. Objects are replaceable. Statues, however, are also symbols. There is no denying that symbols have power, for good and for ill. This particular statue is a highly visible symbol of the city and its four centuries of history. Despite wars and natural disasters, Sendai, and the Tohoku region at large, have endured. The statue’s visible damage may be a bit of a morale blow, including to me as a former resident of the city. But it may also come as some comfort that the statue itself is a survivor, lost and found, cast and recast since its debut in 1935.
Perhaps by exploring that story, we might draw some hope not only for the fate of the equestrian statue, but also for Sendai itself.
A Changing Castle Site
The statue stands on a high plinth bearing bas-relief depictions of Masamune in life, in court garb, and leading his army on the march. The statue itself depicts the city’s founder in his prime: reins in left hand and right hand resting at the small of his back. Masamune is dressed in his iconic gusoku armor and crescent-moon helmet. He looks out over his old castle town from Mount Aoba’s apex.
Here, his castle’s core walls and halls once stood, including the brewery covered in an earlier Unseen Japan article. Sendai’s traditions and the castle’s story are also intertwined. The famous Suzume-odori dance was first performed by the stonemasons who laid its foundation. During the Date family’s rule, the castle was an asset sensitive enough to the domain’s defense that dignitaries from other fiefdoms were instead received at the Matsuyama Estate in Sendai’s Katahira district, which was the residence of the Moniwa family, a senior vassal family in service to the Date.
Vacated by the Date family after its defeat in the Boshin War, the castle became home to the imperial army’s Second Division. Even at the beginning of the imperial army’s control, the site was known for its commanding view of the city and even drew international attention. Charles Appleton Longfellow, son of poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, visited Mount Aoba’s crest with US Minister-Resident Charles De Long, and commented on the view, along with the cannon and other military hardware belonging to the then-Sendai Garrison (Sendai Chindai).
This military presence led to the US Air Force firebombing it in July 1945. Sadly, after the firebombing, little of the original castle remains beyond the walls and a reconstructed gate tower. Since then, the castle’s footprint has transformed. It remains a park. The former third bailey is also home to the Sendai City Museum. At Mount Aoba’s crest, just a short distance from the equestrian statue, is Miyagi-ken Gōkoku Shrine.
To put such an imposing, highly visible statue there was a symbolic local reclaiming of the site.
A Symbolic Reclamation
Especially in the early 20th century, the Tohoku region lingered under a cloud of suspicion, imagined as potential enemies to the imperial loyalty built by the Meiji oligarchs. At the time, the north’s version of the Boshin War was still somewhat politically controversial. The Date of Sendai, in particular, were stilled viewed as traitors to the throne for having led the Northern Alliance. In a Meiji-era text that was one of the first that tried to tell the Date version of the story, its authors wrote the following. The discrimination against which they were fighting is evident in their choice of words. (emphasis mine)
But the most valuable part of this book is the list of names for those officers and foot soldiers under Sendai domain command, killed and wounded during the fighting in support of the Mutsu-Dewa-Echigo Coalition. This is something that neither the book Sendai Boshin-shi nor the book Sendaihan Boshin-shi possesses, so we feel our inclusion of it is particularly valuable. These fallen and wounded men, who served so loyally, ought to be esteemed. Their deaths should be pitied. Thus, though it was sixty long years ago, we naturally cannot forget their names.
Otokozawa Chisato et. al., in “Boshin Shimatsu”
Only during the tenure of Morioka-born Hara Takashi did some of that opposition from the highest levels begin to change. In 1917, just before becoming Prime Minister, Hara famously stated “The Restoration was simply a conflict of political views.” He and other Tohoku natives seizing the moment in the Taisho era to make their voices heard, made that turning point possible.
Although Date Masamune predated the Boshin War by centuries, he was the Date clan’s most famous lord, and the city’s founder, and thus a symbol to post-Boshin Sendai. So, to have erected this statue in 1935, 22 years later while many Boshin War veterans were still alive, speaks to the times that had begun to change.
A Hometown Sculptor and an Anniversary
The occasion was the 300th anniversary of Date Masamune’s death in 1936. A committee chaired by former Prime Minister Saitō Makoto approached Komuro Tōru, a Miyagi-born sculptor, to design a sculpture.
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Komuro Tōru was born in 1899 in what’s now Shibata, Miyagi, the son of a local mayor. After his primary and secondary schooling, he went on to Tokyo where he studied at the Tokyo Art School, today’s Tokyo Gakugei University, where his studies focused on sculpture. He graduated with distinction and made a name for himself in the art world in Tokyo. He was based in Tokyo when approached for the project to build a new statue of Date Masamune.
You can see Komuro’s other work in a number of places around Miyagi. Notably, a few short years after the statue on which this article focuses, he also sculpted the statues of Kamakura-era warrior women Kaede and Hatsune. These statues remain at Tamura jinja in Shiroishi, Miyagi Prefecture.
Careful Attention to Detail
Komuro saw the crafting of this statue as a grave matter. In a letter to a friend, he wrote:
“I see this important mission as the highest honor, and the gravest task of my life. I am determined to craft what later generations will call a great masterpiece.”
Komuro first immersed himself in research. He studied primary sources on Masamune’s life and career in order to better understand the man himself. He also studied 17th-century depictions of the man, at Zuigan-ji in Matsushima and at Zuihoden in Sendai. Then, thanks to local ranchers and veterinarians in Iwanuma, Miyagi, he also studied and extensively sketched horses. Beginning work in December 1933, he finished in May 1935. The result was an incredibly nuanced, lifelike work depicting both rider and horse. As a specialist in Date history, I can point to one particular detail that underlines the depth of the man’s research into Masamune’s life and career.
In life, Masamune had mixed feelings about having lost sight in his right eye. He tried to control the narrative around it by telling stories that still persist, most notably that he ate his own eye out of filial piety, when in fact he was simply appropriating an anecdote from the Romance of the Three Kingdoms about Xiahou Dun. This may seem a little surprising, but the Chinese classics were an important part of a well-rounded literary education for someone of Masamune’s social class.
Beyond this, Masamune was also a sinophile: he hired refugees from the Ming dynasty, built a rich library of Chinese classics, and even named his castle town after a place in Chinese folklore. Sendai is simply the Japanese reading of Xiantai, “Home of the Immortals,” a mythical palace in the Kunlun Mountains built by Emperor Wen.
Masamune also urged those depicting him to depict him with both eyes intact. Indeed, forensic analysis of Masamune’s remains conducted in the 20th century, during the reconstruction of his mausoleum, adds to this picture. We now know that while Masamune was blind in his right eye, he did not remove it. Masamune’s insistence on his preferred type of depiction meant that images of him with one eye– with or without an eyepatch– did not appear for many years.
Komuro’s sculpture accounts for Masamune’s disability and depicts it subtly. The man himself might have been pleased. You can see this detail on close examination of the statue’s bust segment. An alternate iteration of it stands in the woods behind the Sendai City Museum.
Look closely. While both eyes are there, only the iris of Masamune’s seeing eye is incised.
An Untimely End, and a Gradual Rebirth
The statue on Mount Aoba was unveiled to widespread acclaim under the auspices of the Miyagi Prefecture Youth Association. Inasmuch as it was a tourist draw in its first 8 years of existence, this history was ultimately brief. In 1943, the wartime government-issued imperial edict number 667, the Order for Collection of Metals (Kinzokurui Kaishū-rei), which sealed the statue’s fate along with many other statues across the empire. And so, in 1944, the government ordered the Komuro statue of Masamune was taken down. It was broken up for wartime scrap metal. It was thus, ironically, spared from destruction when the US Air Force firebombed Sendai.
But just like the city that Masamune founded, war was not the end of the story for the equestrian statue.
Even during the Occupation, the first efforts at restoring a statue of Masamune, if not remaking the equestrian statue itself, had already begun. Sculptor Yanagihara Yoshitatsu designed a new Masamune statue. The city set it up on the same site in 1953. It’s called “Date Masamune-kō Heiwa-zō” (Lord Date Masamune Peace Statue).
It speaks to Occupation-era attitudes, depicting a standing Masamune in everyday attire rather than armor, though with wakizashi at his hip. In contrast to the Komuro statue’s subtlety in depicting Masamune’s blind eye, the Yanagihara statue depicts Masamune’s right eye closed. While the statue does survive, it is now on the site of Iwadeyama Castle, another place Masamune lived before Sendai Castle’s construction.
The Peace Statue was relocated thanks to a growing movement calling for the original equestrian statue’s restoration. And the occasion of the (original) Tokyo Olympics, and Japan’s growing postwar prosperity, offered just the occasion and means for that restoration.
A Landmark Restored and Restored Again
Komuro Tōru died in 1953 and did not live to see his work restored. However, in his will, he left many sculptures and contents of his studio to local institutions of learning in his hometown of Shibata. Also in Shibata was the original cast of Masamune’s equestrian statue. In March of 1964, the town handed over this cast to the Sendai Tourism Association, which spearheaded the effort to restore the statue. Recast in Tokyo, it was shipped back to Sendai. The association unveiled it amid much fanfare on 9 October 1964, ensconced on the original statue’s platform, the day before the Tokyo Olympics opened.
Apart from moving 20 meters to the south in 1998, it has remained in the same place to this day, once again a tourist spot and a symbol of the city.
Despite the March 2022 earthquake’s damage, it’s still there.
Not the Only One
Today, the restored equestrian statue of Date Masamune is a motif that often recurs around Sendai, on lamp-posts and on the doors of local taxis. But the statue is not the only public statue of the man in Miyagi Prefecture, or even in Sendai itself. Consider three examples of particular note.
First, at the foot of Mount Aoba, there stands the bust that survives from the original casting, installed as a monument behind the Sendai City Museum. Aoba Shrine, which enshrines the deified Masamune, once played host to it until the bust’s move to its present location in 1958.
Second, in Sendai Station, there is a smaller equestrian statue among the restaurants on the third floor. It sits in a modest display educating travelers about the man’s life. Meanwhile, a bas-relief in the style of Komuro’s work stands outside Sendai City Hall in the Kōtōdai-kōen area. It’s small enough that you might miss it. It sits atop a mailbox, but the city erected it in 1999 to commemorate its population surpassing the 1 million mark.
Third, just outside the city at Takekoma Inari Shrine in Iwanuma, Miyagi, is a plaster casting of Komuro’s original statue. This statue is displayed indoors at the shrine’s museum of horsemanship. It is not mounted as high as its recast version on the castle site. Although the museum is currently closed for renovation, it is well worth the visit when it does reopen:
Conclusion
As we discussed earlier, statues are symbols, and symbols have power. As you can see, despite its visible damage from the recent earthquake, this statue has had an eventful history. Like the city that Masamune founded, this particular statue has been especially enduring in the public consciousness. And at the most visible point in what was once the Date clan’s fortress and then an imperial army installation, it remains. Though presently shrouded by scaffolding, it is still a symbol of the city’s pride, history, and strength.
So take heart, and don’t count Sendai out just yet: Masamune will ride on.
Sources
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- Nyri Bakkalian. “What Charley Longfellow Saw.” Metropolis Japan, April 27, 2017. Accessed 3 April 2022.
- “Bansei ni Itaru made: Date Masamune Kibazō o Shiru.” 万世に至るまで－伊達政宗騎騎馬像を知る－ Sendai Mediatheque. Accessed 19 May 2022.
- “Chapter 18: Giving Counsels, Jia Xu Directs a Great Victory; Braving Battlefield, Xiahou Dun Loses an Eye.” Threekingdoms.com, accessed 20 May 2022.
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- Tim Kelly, Chang-Ran Kim and Kiyoshi Takenaka. “Quake hits Japan off Fukushima coast, leaving two dead and reviving painful memories.” Reuters.com, 16 March 2022. Accessed 21 May 2022.
- “Kinzokurui Kaishūrei Kaishō no ken, Gochōmei Genbun: Shōwa 18nen Chokurei Dai 667gō” 金属類回収令改正ノ件・御署名原本・昭和十八年・勅令第六六七号. National Archives of Japan Digital Archive. Accessed 19 May 2022.
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- “Komuro Tōru.” Shibata Town, August 7, 2017. Accessed 3 April 2022.
- Charles Appleton Longfellow. Ronguferō Nihon Taizaiki. Translated by Yamada Kumiko. (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 2004), p. 118
- Mihara Ryōkichi 三原良吉. Kyōdoshi Sendai Mimibukuro 郷土史仙台耳ぶくろ. (Sendai: Hōbundō, 1983), pp. 47-50.
- “Miyagi, Fukushima oki o shingen toshita jishin ni tomonau higai ni tsuite (3gatsu 17nichi (mokuyōbi) 2ji 20fun jiten)” 宮城・福島沖を震源とした地震に伴う被害について（３月１７日（木曜日）２時２０分時点） Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry, 17 March 2022. Accessed 21 May 2022.
- Oka Yoshitake. Five Political Leaders of Modern Japan. Translated by Andrew Fraser and Patricia Murray. (Tōkyō: University of Tokyo Press, 1986), pp. 86-87.
- Otokozawa Chisato, Itō Sukemasa, Yano Michisato, and Imamura Moriyuki. “Boshin Shimatsu,” pp. 41-325 of Sendai Sōsho Volume 12. (Sendai: Hōbundō, 1974), p. 42
- “Shin’en o Tazunete: Keidai no Goannai.” Takekoma Jinja. Accessed 17 May 2022.
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