Slow Weekend: Coastal Miyagi Travel Through Sendai, Matsushima & Ishinomaki

Tokyo makes it remarkably easy to travel quickly. Sometimes that makes me want to travel more slowly. This summer, my daughter and I left Tokyo for an extended weekend in Miyagi, with our 14 year old Shiba coming along, too. 

This isn’t intended to be a definitive Miyagi itinerary. It’s one family’s long weekend, and the beginning of a new way I want to explore Japan beyond Tokyo.

Coastal Miyagi Travel Through Sendai, Matsushima & Ishinomaki

 

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Why Miyagi?

The trip actually began with Date Masamune.

My daughter has become fascinated by him, which has already taken us around Tokyo looking for places connected to the Date family. When she was selected to participate in a children’s workshop at Sendai City Museum, traveling to Miyagi suddenly felt like the natural next chapter.

Instead of treating Sendai as the entire destination, I began looking further north toward Matsushima and, eventually, Ishinomaki. 

And Then There Was Our Shiba

There was one other member of the family to consider.

Our Shiba is 14 years old, so planning a trip with him isn’t simply a matter of finding places marked “pet-friendly.”

In fact, finding suitable accommodation during a busy summer weekend is one of the reasons Ishinomaki became our base for all three nights.

What initially looked like a logistical compromise ended up changing the geography of our entire Miyagi weekend.

The Journey North

It had been more than six years since my daughter and I had ridden the Shinkansen together.

When she was little, trains were everything. We used to take advantage of a special train museum and Shinkansen ticket in Omiya. (Referenced in this guide: Ride The Shinkansen To The Railway Museum!)

I became remarkably good at navigating Tokyo Station with a stroller just so I could take her up to the platforms to ooh and aah at the different trains. (Another guide I wrote: How to See Shinkansen at Tokyo Station)

 

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Eventually that fascination gave way to other things (like the current sticker craze), as childhood interests tend to do. Although every now and then she still gets excited when she spots a female conductor or train driver.

So, there was something unexpectedly lovely about boarding the Tohoku Shinkansen and seeing a little of that 3 year old version of her again.

Somewhere in those six years, Tokyo Station had apparently rearranged itself. I was back to hunting for elevators and ramps… except with a senior Shiba instead of a preschooler. 

A few last-minute ticket complications also meant buying our seats on the day. By the time we did, the seats I felt comfortable booking with a dog were in the Green Car, putting us roughly ¥9,000 over budget before we’d properly left Tokyo.

Not exactly the auspicious beginning to my new slow-travel series.

Matsushima: When the Trip Started Feeling Like a Trip

With rain in the forecast, I’d booked the 2 PM sightseeing cruise thinking it would give us Matsushima, rain or shine. 

Instead, for a while at least, the weather gave us Matsushima.

From the water, the pine-covered islands seemed to appear one after another.

My daughter headed upstairs for unobstructed views, while I stayed below with our dog and listened to the stories behind the islands as they passed the windows. 

My embarrassingly immediate reaction was: Well, now I need to see the other two.

Apparently I’d already turned the beautiful place directly in front of me into a checklist.

So I made myself stop. There would be other trips. For now, there was only Matsushima.

Food, however, presented one small problem.

Matsushima’s famous oysters were unfortunately off the table because of my seafood allergy. The ubiquitous zunda shakes came with queues longer than my willingness to wait. Instead, my daughter steered us toward something she’d spotted earlier: ¥1,000 gyutan senbei.

I initially balked at the price, expecting a senbei like the ones we always bought in Shibamata.

Then it arrived.

The enormous, thin cracker was larger than a dinner plate. Definitely something to share.

We added dango on skewers and matcha and took everything outside overlooking the bay.

This is the Matsushima moment I remember most clearly.

My daughter and I shared the dango. I broke off suitable little pieces of the crispy rice cracker for our dog. Matsushima Bay stretched out in front of me. For a little while, there was nowhere else we needed to be.

Matsushima has inspired considerably more accomplished writers than me, Matsuo Basho among them. 

I don’t have a poem.

Rather, I have a memory of sitting outside with my daughter and our old dog, passing food back and forth with the bay behind us.

Truth be told, we had more planned: Zuiganji. Entsuin. The Date Masamune Historical Museum. Places that would have begun connecting Matsushima to the Date Masamune story that had brought us to Miyagi Prefecture in the first place.

Then came the first drops of rain.

Thunder rolled somewhere in the distance, and the sky over the bay began changing.

For once, we didn’t try to beat the weather and squeeze another attraction into the day. We watched another version of Matsushima appear beneath the gathering clouds and decided it was time to continue to Ishinomaki.

Our Home Base in Ishinomaki

For this trip, I wanted somewhere that could genuinely feel like home for a few days. That search eventually led me to Kame House, a dog-friendly minpaku tucked into a hilly residential neighborhood of Ishinomaki.

The house is closer to the original idea of Airbnb than the private vacation rentals many of us are accustomed to. Our host, Miki-san, lives downstairs with her dogs while we had our own space upstairs and shared parts of the family home.

Almost immediately, it felt less like accommodation and more like staying with a relative. (The kind you actually get along with.)

The house was thoughtfully stocked and comfortable, but my favorite room may have been the sunroom.

From there, I could sit with one of the many books from the house while watching my daughter and our dog outside.

 At 14, he doesn’t need much excitement anymore. Give him a garden with unfamiliar smells to investigate at his own pace and apparently he’s found his version of a resort.

Getting to Know Ishinomaki

Before this trip, Ishinomaki was a name I knew for reasons I wish I didn’t.

Like Onagawa and Rikuzentakata, it was one of those place names that became familiar through the relentless coverage following the March 11, 2011 earthquake and tsunami, and then through the years of reporting on reconstruction and recovery.

I knew where Ishinomaki was. I knew something of what had happened there. But, I didn’t really know Ishinomaki as a place where people simply live.

Ishinomaki turned out to be a city of manga, ferries, islands and ordinary summer weekends. 

From here you can take a boat to Tashiro Island, better known as Cat Island.

There was far more we wanted to see than we managed to fit into three nights.

One afternoon, we returned from Tashiro Island and stepped off the ferry straight into live music from a weekend festival near the waterfront.

There were food trucks, people sitting outside and, importantly in August, kakigori, shaved ice.

Our plans to continue sightseeing and visit Sant Juan Bautista Park were quietly abandoned.

We ate, listened to the music and ended up talking with an older gentleman visiting from nearby Shiogama. At some point he mentioned that he had once lived in Alabama.

Alabama.

Japanese people I meet who have lived in America somehow always seem to say “California,” “Hawaii,” or “New York.” 

As someone from the American South, hearing “Alabama” immediately changed the conversation. In my mind, we were practically neighbors.

Before long he was treating my daughter to another serving of spicy fried chicken. I probably should have protested more vigorously, but there are moments when travel is better when you simply let people be kind.

It was one of my favorite encounters of the entire weekend.

The Ishinomaki I Thought I Knew

Back at Kame House, the bookshelves gave me another way into the city.

Miki-san had books about architecture and Ishinomaki. Among them were books about Okawa Elementary School and the children and teachers who lost their lives in the tsunami. 

Reading about it while lying on a futon beside my nearly 10 year old daughter wasn’t exactly light vacation reading.

But perhaps that was precisely why it stayed with me.

Throughout Ishinomaki, we had already noticed green tsunami evacuation signs marking buildings, schools and other designated places to seek safety. Even tall residential buildings visibly identify evacuation points.

Living in Japan, disaster preparedness can become strangely ordinary. 

We know where evacuation areas are. Schools conduct drills. Emergency bags sit somewhere in the house. Earthquake alerts interrupt our phones.

And because these things are so familiar, it can also become easy to stop thinking deeply about why we do them.

Reading about Okawa Elementary School with my daughter sleeping beside me brought that back into focus in a way I hadn’t expected from this trip. By the end, I wished I’d given Ishinomaki another day.

Following Date Masamune to Sendai

I’ve mentioned Date Masamune several times by now without properly explaining why a samurai lord who lived more than 400 years ago brought us all the way to Miyagi. 

Date Masamune (1567–1636)  founded Sendai and ruled the Sendai domain during the transition from Japan’s warring-states period into the Edo period. Known as the Dokuganryu, or “One-Eyed Dragon,” after losing the sight in one eye as a child, he remains one of the most recognizable figures in Japanese history.

(If you have time, do watch the NHK Daiga Drama Dokuganryu Masamue. It stars a young Watanabe Ken and the entire cast is brilliant!)

But explaining his historical importance doesn’t entirely explain why my daughter is fascinated by him. She can trace part of her own lineage to an 11th-century warrior clan. Still, something about Masamune captured her imagination in particular.

So, when she was selected as one of just 14 children to participate in a workshop at Sendai City Museum, that workshop wasn’t something we needed to fit into our Miyagi itinerary. It was the reason there was an itinerary at all.

We didn’t see nearly as much of Sendai as I’d planned. In fact, we spent most of the day at the museum, wandered through shops choosing souvenirs for ourselves, and somehow managed to turn gyutan into a comparative tasting exercise.

And for once, I don’t particularly regret what we didn’t see.

Four Days Later

We came to Miyagi because of Date Masamune, but our dog determined where we stayed. Rain changed our plans in Matsushima. A festival kept us from seeing everything we’d planned in Ishinomaki. A museum workshop left us with far less time to explore Sendai than I’d imagined.

And four days later, I wouldn’t rearrange any of it.

This was also our first proper family vacation in longer than I care to admit. When I made the decision to solo parent, having separate bedrooms at home was important to me. We each needed space that was our own.

At Kame House, my daughter and I slept on futons beside each other in a Japanese tatami room, usually ending the night snuggled together. On trains up and down the coast, we leaned against each other when we were tired. Our old dog needed to be carried up and down the stairs, which meant considerably more cuddling than he probably bargained for.

At home in Tokyo, the best I can usually give him is a longer leash and an open stretch of park. But, in Ishinomaki, I could sit in the sunroom while he wandered freely, sniffing his way around the dog run with my daughter nearby.

I think that closeness was something I hadn’t realized we’d been missing.

Perhaps that’s what I’ll remember most about our four days in Miyagi. Not whether we made it to every temple or museum I’d bookmarked, but sleeping side by side, leaning on each other on trains, watching an old dog discover a garden, and having nowhere more important to be.

There are still plenty of things we didn’t see.

…And perhaps that’s the best reason to go back.

Where Next?

Slow Weekends is my growing collection of journeys beyond Tokyo. Places to stay a little longer, travel a little slower, and leave enough room for the experiences I couldn’t have planned.

One Day in Matsushima → The bay, what we ate, and what I’d make time for on our next visit.

One Day in Sendai → Following the Date Masamune story that brought us to Miyagi in the first place.　Coming Soon

One Day in Ishinomaki → Tashirojima, the waterfront, and why our unexpected home base deserved another day. Coming Soon

Coastal Miyagi Travel Through Sendai, Matsushima & Ishinomaki