Narrow Road To The Deep North 28

In 1604, Masamune, accompanied by 52,000 vassals and their families, moved to the small fishing village of Sendai, leaving behind his fourth son to rule Iwadeyama. Masamune would turn Sendai into a magnificent city, and himself into one of Japan’s most powerful daimyô, eventually ruling one of the largest fiefdoms of the later Tokugawa shogunate. He built many palaces and projects to beautify Sendai, and his backwater home of Tōhoku. For the next 270 years, Masamune’s realm would trade and prosper, and attract many visitors. In 1689, my favorite haiku master, in his own Narrow Road to the Deep North, praised Sendai’s famous bay for the beauty and serenity of its two hundred tiny pine islets. He had few words.

                                             ‘Matsushima ah!
                                             A-ah, Matsushima, ah!
                                             Matsushima, ah!’
                                                              Matsuo Basho

Despite the fact that few trusted him completely, Masamune was ultimately highly respected for his ethics, and served the Toyotomi and Tokugawa loyally. He visited Ieyasu on his deathbed, and read him a piece of his own Zen poetry.
Masamune was a patron of the arts. He opened the doors of his province to Christian missionaries and other foreigners, leading to his greatest achievement. 
Masamune funded a voyage to establish relations with Pope Paul V in Rome, motivated at least in part by a desire for foreign technology. His exploration ship, the Date Maru (or San Juan Bautista), would become the first Japanese vessel to sail around the world.
One of the earliest Japanese-built Western-style ships, a nanban-sen ‘Southern Barbarian boat,’ the Date Maru was constructed in 45 days during 1613, in Tsuki-No-Ura harbour. The project had been approved by the Ieyasu’s Bakufu government in Edo, and required his technical experts, 800 shipwrights, 700 smiths, 3000 carpenters and two Spaniards- the Spanish captain Sebastián Vizcaíno, and a Franciscan friar.
Brother Luis Sotelo was a keystone historical interface figure, between the ephemeral open doors of warlords like Masamune, and the slammed shut closure of Japan that would come under Ieyasu for the next 250 years. After Pope Paul V had authorized the Dominicans and Franciscans to also proselytize in Japan in 1608, heretofore the preserve of the Jesuits, Sotelo had spent four years in Manila, learning Japanese. The church he tried to establish in Edo was destroyed in 1612, following a bribery scandal between a Tokagawa collaborator and a Christian daimyô. This put Ieyasu in a foul mood, and indisposed to indulgences. Having healed a concubine of Masamune’s, Sotelo was invited to safe haven in his domain, where Christianity was still allowed. When Sotelo returned to inaugurate a new church in Tokyo in May of the following year, he was imprisoned until Masamune could get him out through a special request. His fellow Christians were summarily executed. Masamune received Ieyasu’s approval to hire Sotelo as translator for his embassy. The timing would save his life, for a while.