Miyagi Prefecture is a prefectureofJapan located in the Tōhoku regiononHonshū island. The capital is Sendai. Miyagi Prefecture was formerly part of the province of Mutsu. Mutsu Province, on northern Honshū, was one of the last provinces to be formed as land was taken from the indigenous Ainu and became the largest as it expanded northward. The ancient capital was in modern Miyagi Prefecture. In the 3rd month of 2nd year of the Wadō era (709), there was an uprising against governmental authority in Mutsu Province and in nearby Echigo Province. Troops were promptly dispatched to subdue the revolt. In Wadō 5 (712), the land of Mutsu Province was administratively separated from Dewa Province. Empress Genmei's Daijō-kan continued to organize other cadastral changes in the provincial map of the Nara period, as in the following year when Mimasaka Province was divided from Bizen Province; Hyūga Province was sundered from Ōsumi Province; and Tanba Province was severed from Tango Province. During the Sengoku period various clans ruled different parts of the province. The Uesugi clan had a castle town at Wakamatsu in the south, the Nanbu clanatMorioka in the north, and Date Masamune, a close ally of the Tokugawa, established Sendai, which is now the largest town of the Tōhoku region. In the Meiji period, four new provinces were created from parts of Mutsu: Rikuchū, Rikuzen, Iwaki, and Iwashiro. The area that is now Aomori Prefecture continued to be part of Mutsu until the Abolition of the han system and the nationwide conversion to the prefectural structure of modern Japan.
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