Tōhoku

Tōhoku is the northeastern region of Honshu, formerly called Mutsu and Dewa. It was the homeland of the Emishi, horse-riding people beyond the Yamato frontier who held out against imperial armies for centuries.

They crushed an invasion at the Koromo River in 789, but the general Sakanoue no Tamuramaro learned their mounted archery and forced the Emishi leader Aterui to surrender in 802, and the long frontier war ended in 811; the defeated Emishi submitted or withdrew toward Hokkaido. In the twelfth century the Northern Fujiwara, of mixed Yamato and Emishi blood, ruled from Hiraizumi until Minamoto no Yoritomo destroyed their realm in 1189 before he founded the Kamakura shogunate.

Later the warlord Date Masamune built Sendai into a great Tokugawa domain and sent an embassy to the Pope in Rome before Christian persecutions closed the country. Under Tokugawa peace Tōhoku became a quiet backcountry of rice domains, whose roads and scenery the haiku poet Matsuo Bashō memorialized in The Narrow Road to the Deep North.