There is a railway station inside the park. Ashino Park covers about eighty hectares around a lake in the north of Aomori, and the single track of the Tsugaru Railway runs straight through the middle of it, past a small wooden station building of the old kind. About fifteen hundred cherry trees grow here. Where the line passes under them the branches come down low over the rails.

So the train goes through the flowers rather than past them. It is a slow two-carriage service on a line that has been under threat of closure more than once, and in the last week of April it carries more people than at any other time of year. The city gives the flowering as late April into the first days of May.

The writer Dazai Osamu grew up in Kanagi, a short distance from here, and the park is remembered as somewhere he played as a boy. There is a literary monument to him among the trees, and a statue. Both are easy to walk past. The park does not make a great deal of them.

The best part of a visit is the waiting. Trains are infrequent. You stand on the platform with the lake behind you and look down the line, and the cherry branches on either side get lower and closer together as they go, until at the far end they close over the rails and the track disappears into them.