Mitsubishi's Nagasaki shipyards completed Sendai on 29 April 1924. She was named for the Sendai River that runs through southern Kyushu, and she was the lead ship of a class designed for one purpose: to lead a flotilla of destroyers fast and hard into enemy water. She was long, lightly armored, and graceful in profile - the Imperial Japanese Navy's idea of a greyhound. Her first years were spent on the Yangtze, patrolling the Chinese coast through a colonial era that would soon collapse into total war. By the time she played her role in the Battle of Shanghai in 1937, she was already a veteran. In the long quiet years between the wars, her crews learned her rhythms in the river deltas of southern China. When the Pacific war came, Sendai would carry those crews far from Kyushu.

On 20 November 1941, Sendai became flagship of Destroyer Squadron 3 under Rear Admiral Shintaro Hashimoto. Her first war task was enormous in consequence: escorting the transports carrying Lieutenant General Tomoyuki Yamashita and the Japanese 25th Army to invade Malaya. She began bombarding Kota Bharu at 23:45 on 7 December 1941 - hours before the attack on Pearl Harbor across the dateline. RAAF Hudson bombers came in over the beach, sinking one transport and damaging two more, but the landings held. In the weeks that followed, Sendai made convoy run after convoy run down to Malaya, fought a surface action off Endau that sank the Australian destroyer Thanet, and escorted the landings in Sumatra. She was present at the systematic Japanese drive through Southeast Asia, the phase of the war when Japan still seemed unstoppable. Her Main Body detachment followed the Combined Fleet toward Midway in May 1942 - six hundred nautical miles behind the carriers, never sighting an American ship. Sendai turned for home without firing. The catastrophe ahead of her was still invisible.

By August 1942 the war had swung around and Sendai found herself bound for the same islands Kinugasa was bleeding in. She shelled Tulagi, bombarded Henderson Field, covered convoys into Shortland and Rabaul. At the Second Naval Battle of Guadalcanal the American battleship Washington trained its 16-inch main guns on her - missed. She came through both Naval Battles of Guadalcanal without a scratch, in part because she spent them as distant cover, watching the slaughter from a safer layer of the screen. Back in Sasebo in mid-1943 for refit, she traded her aft 5.5-inch gun for anti-aircraft mounts and a Type 21 radar set. Rear Admiral Matsuji Ijuin raised his flag in her in July. For three months she covered reinforcement convoys to Buin and Shortland while American air attacks - Avengers, B-25s, a B-24 - kept trying and kept missing. Her luck was the kind that always runs out on a specific date.

The date was 2 November 1943. The Allies had landed at Cape Torokina on Bougainville the day before, and the Japanese sortied to shatter the beachhead. Sendai led the screen. At Empress Augusta Bay, Task Force 39 was waiting - four American light cruisers with search radar and gun-control radar and a clear picture of where the Japanese column was. The Japanese destroyer Shigure sighted the Americans at 7,500 yards and hurled eight torpedoes into the night. Sendai turned hard starboard, nearly colliding with Shigure in the confusion, and the American cruisers opened fire. Their first salvo hit. So did the next. Shells tore into her as she tried to maneuver, and she caught fire amidships and could not shake the American radar lock. She burned through the dark hours. By morning she was gone - along with the destroyer Hatsukaze. Captain Shoji died with 184 of his sailors. Destroyers pulled 236 others from the oil-slick water. Admiral Ijuin and another 75 survivors were picked up the next day by the submarine that would prove the last mercy of the engagement. The Navy List removed her name on 5 January 1944.

Sendai's wreck lies deep in the sea northwest of Bougainville, at roughly 6.17 south, 154.33 east - a position known from the battle's after-action reports but not marked by any buoy. No one dives her. From altitude the water shows nothing, only reef shadow and open ocean. The Bougainville coast to the east bears the scars of the war Sendai failed to turn back: old airstrips returned to jungle, rusting tanks, the occasional wingtip showing through the green. The sea here keeps its own accounting. Two hundred and forty-seven Japanese sailors were rescued from Sendai. One hundred and eighty-five were not. The numbers are small as the Pacific war went. They were not small to the families in Kyushu who received the telegrams that winter.