Sendai City War Reconstruction Memorial Hall

The Sendai City War Reconstruction Memorial Hall (仙台市戦災復興記念館) stands at 2-12-1 Omachi, Aoba Ward, Sendai, approximately five minutes on foot from Omachi-Nishi-Koen Station on the Sendai Subway Tozai Line. Constructed at a cost of 1.59 billion yen, it opened in April 1981 to preserve the memory of Sendai's wartime destruction and postwar rebirth.

The permanent exhibition hall documents the devastating air raid of July 10, 1945. On the afternoon of the previous day, 131 B-29 Superfortress bombers of the USAAF 58th Bombardment Wing launched from Tinian Island in the Mariana Islands. Of these, 123 aircraft arrived over Sendai at an altitude of approximately 3,000 meters (10,000 feet) shortly after midnight. Splitting into 25 groups of two to five aircraft each, they carpet-bombed the densely packed residential center with 12,961 incendiary bombs and clusters over approximately two hours.

The resulting firestorm destroyed a five-square-kilometer area — roughly 23% of the entire city. A total of 11,933 residences were burned, and casualties included 1,064 killed according to a later re-examination of the victim list (the wartime city survey counted 987 dead and 50 missing; the figure reaches 1,399 if suspected cases are included), 260 seriously injured, and 1,423 with lesser injuries. Among the irreplaceable losses were the historic structures of Sendai Castle (Aoba Castle) and the Zuihoden mausoleum of Date Masamune, founder of the Sendai domain.

The exhibition features wartime photographs, survivor testimonies, a diorama of the burning city, recovered artifacts, and documentation of the postwar reconstruction city plan adopted in 1946 that transformed Sendai's street grid with wide boulevards such as Aoba-dori and Hirose-dori. Every year around July 10, the hall hosts a special "War Disaster Reconstruction Exhibition" (戦災復興展) and the city holds the "Sendai War Dead and War Disaster Victims Joint Memorial Service" (仙台市戦没者戦災死者合同慰霊祭).

The facility underwent major renovation from July 2021 to November 2022. In addition to the exhibition, it houses 11 conference rooms of various sizes and a 270-seat auditorium used for civic and cultural events.