Essential Japanese phrases

Your residence card, issued at the airport for medium and long-term stays. Carry it at all times — it is a legal requirement.

Ward registration, due within fourteen days of moving in. Sendai has five wards and it must be the one your address falls in. Everything else waits on it.

Your tax and social-security number, issued after ward registration. The physical card now doubles as your health insurance card.

Residence tax, calculated on last year's income and billed from the following June. Cheap in year one, expensive in year two, and Miyagi's flat portion is the highest of Japan's major cities.

Disaster hazard zone. On Sendai's coast this is not advisory — since December 2011 new homes may not be built in the designated strip of Wakabayashi and Miyagino wards.

'City of trees', the city's own name for itself. The zelkova avenues along Jōzenji-dōri and Aoba-dōri are the reason, and they are maintained as civic infrastructure rather than decoration.

Sendai's star festival, 6–8 August, the largest in Japan. The arcades are hung with enormous paper streamers and the city fills. Book anything you need in early August months ahead.

Thick-sliced grilled beef tongue with barley rice and oxtail soup — a post-war Sendai invention and the city's defining dish. Ordered as a set, not as a side.

Sweetened crushed young soybean, used on mochi and now in shakes at the station. Bright green, faintly grassy, and entirely local to this region.

'Branch-office economy' — the standard description of Sendai's job market. Most large employers here are the Tōhoku regional branch of a Tokyo company, which shapes how careers and transfers work.

The Sendai dialect's sentence ending, roughly 'it is'. Softer than standard Japanese and instantly recognisable to anyone in Japan who watched Urusei Yatsura.

110 for police, 119 for fire and ambulance. Both free from any phone, including a locked one.