Six hundred cherry trees stand where Hideyoshi put a castle. Hokoen occupies the site of Nagahama castle, held by Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and covers 15.6 hectares. Nagahama city gives about six hundred trees, Somei-yoshino and Jindai-akebono among them, flowering from the first part of April into the middle of the month. The park's name carries the first character of Hideyoshi's own. Of the castle itself nothing above ground survives.

It sits directly on the shore of Lake Biwa, which is the other half of the story.

The city records that in years when the lake has dropped far enough, the remains of a well known as the Taiko-ido have come back out of the water, having spent the intervening decades underneath it.

So the ground here has several layers, and they surface at different times and for different reasons. A castle that is gone, a lake that occasionally gives back what it covered, and a municipal park laid over both of them with six hundred cherry trees planted on top. Only the top layer flowers, and only for a fortnight, and it is the layer almost everyone comes for. What is underneath does not usually announce itself, and in an ordinary April nobody standing on the grass has any reason to think about it.