Tohoku (the northeast)

The northeast, and for most of Japanese history the inside of the frontier. Tohoku was the land of the Emishi, peoples the Yamato state spent from the seventh to the ninth century subduing through a slow campaign of forts pushed steadily north. The conquest gave Japan the title of shogun, coined for the general commanding those expeditions. Even after incorporation the region stayed peripheral, cold and poor. Its one moment of independent splendour came with the Northern Fujiwara at Hiraizumi, who ruled a wealthy gold-trading domain in the twelfth century and built the gold-leafed Konjikido before Yoritomo destroyed them in 1189. The climate has repeatedly defined the region's history: the yamase, a cold summer wind off the Pacific, ruins rice harvests periodically, and the Tenmei and Tenpo famines of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries killed on a scale that emptied villages. Rural poverty here supplied emigrants to Hokkaido, conscripts to the army, and daughters sold into the textile mills and brothels, a pattern that fed the radical nationalism of young officers in the 1930s. Tohoku backed the shogunate in 1868 and was treated as a defeated territory afterwards, a resentment that lasted. The region's modern identity is bound up with 11 March 2011, when a magnitude nine earthquake and the tsunami it generated killed nearly twenty thousand people along the Sanriku coast and destroyed the Fukushima Daiichi reactors. Reconstruction is largely complete and repopulation is not. Sendai is the region's only large city. Hiraizumi's Konjikido still stands. Basho's Narrow Road to the Deep North records a journey through the region in 1689. Aomori's apples and Akita's rice remain its best-known products.

• Existed: 800 CE – present
• Type: Entity