Date Masamune's fearsome reputation earned him the nickname of the 'One Eyed Dragon'. A childhood bout of smallpox left him blinded in his right eye, although he has two eyes in all his portraits. He was instrumental in bringing the mighty Tokugawa Ieyasu to power, and in return was granted the fiefdom around Sendai, which was wealthy and sizeable enough to allow him to send representatives to Rome. His mortuary temple here is decorated in the Momoyama style, which is the period preceeding Ieyasu's reign. In the statue you can just make out the distinctive crescent moon on his helmet, which in some of the illustrations was up to three feet long. The decoration is something of a white elephant, in that no-one and nothing explains exactly why he had it - perhaps many were too afraid to ask. He is now immortalised as a Hello Kitty.