Sendaiculture & etiquette

On 16 December 2011 Sendai designated a strip of the coastal parts of Wakabayashi and Miyagino wards as a disaster hazard zone under the Building Standards Act — the city's 'category 5' zone — in which new residential building and residential extension are prohibited. The line was drawn where the city's reconstruction planning predicted tsunami inundation would still exceed two metres even after every planned defence was built, and households inside it were supported to relocate. If you are looking at coastal land or a very cheap plot east of the Sendai Tōbu Road, this is the first thing to check and it is unambiguous when you do.

Japanese law requires you to register your address at the ward office covering it within fourteen days of moving in. Sendai's wards are Aoba, Miyagino, Wakabayashi, Taihaku and Izumi, and they are not interchangeable — Aoba alone runs from the city centre out to Akiu's hot springs in the mountains. Registration produces the jūminhyō and triggers your My Number, and without it you cannot enrol in health insurance, open most bank accounts or complete a phone contract.

The tsunami risk is mapped, bounded and east of the city. The hazard that catches people looking at pleasant, leafy, 1970s hillside housing in western Aoba and Taihaku is different: large areas of those new towns were built on cut-and-fill terraces, and embankment failures damaged houses there in both the 1978 Miyagi-ken-oki earthquake and again in 2011. Sendai publishes mapping of large-scale filled development land alongside its other hazard maps. Ask the agent, and look the address up — the surface of a finished street tells you nothing about what is under it.

Sendai hosts one of Japan's eight regional immigration bureaux, serving Miyagi, Fukushima, Yamagata, Iwate, Akita and Aomori. That means extensions and status changes are decided here rather than referred to another city — a real advantage over a branch office. It also means the counter serves a region of several million people from one building, so file an extension from three months before expiry rather than in the final fortnight.

The Namboku Line has run north–south since 1987; the Tōzai Line opened on 6 December 2015 and runs east–west from Yagiyama Zoological Park through the centre to Arai. They cross at Sendai Station. That is the whole rail network inside the city, so a great deal of Sendai is on buses, and where a flat sits relative to those two lines is the single biggest daily-life variable in a search here. The Tōzai Line in particular reshaped where it is pleasant to live, and rents along it have not entirely caught up.

The per-capita portion of residence tax from FY2024 is ¥3,000 to Sendai City plus ¥2,200 to Miyagi Prefecture plus ¥1,000 for the national Forest Environment Tax — ¥6,200 a year regardless of income. The prefectural figure is ¥1,200 above the ¥1,000 standard because of the みやぎ環境税, an environmental surcharge running from FY2011 through FY2032. Against Saitama's ¥5,000 it is a small sum, but it is the largest such surcharge of the four Japanese cities here and it is the line on a first bill that people cannot otherwise account for.