Tottori's flowering is declared from a park entrance. The specimen tree that the Tottori meteorological observatory uses for its announcement stands at the gate of Hisamatsu Park, according to the prefecture's tourism authority, and there are over four hundred cherry trees inside the grounds, Somei-yoshino and sato-zakura among them. As at Kimiidera in Wakayama, this is not a site where the season is estimated from elsewhere. It is where the measurement is taken.

The park is the site of Tottori castle, which is the other half of what is standing there.

It was a mountain fortress centred on Hisamatsuyama, in use from the Tenbun era in the middle of the sixteenth century until the Meiji restoration.

The remains are still legible: the upper enclosure at the summit, and at the foot of the hill the second bailey, the Tenkyumaru with its unusual round stone bastion, and the third bailey below that. The tree that decides when spring has officially arrived in this prefecture is planted at the entrance to all of that. A fortress that stopped being needed some hundred and fifty years ago, and an observation that is still made every single year without fail, occupy the same gateway.