For about ten days a year this garden is free. Kenrokuen is designated a Special Place of Scenic Beauty and normally charges admission, but when the cherry trees open, according to the Kanazawa tourism association, the gates are thrown open at no cost and closing time moves back to half past nine at night. There are around four hundred and twenty cherry trees inside, which is not many by the standards of a park but is a great many for a garden of this size. The peak comes in the first part of April.

So the garden waives its fee at exactly the moment most people want to come.

A garden of this kind is built to be walked slowly and in small numbers. The paths are narrow, the sightlines are composed, and the whole design assumes you will stop where it wants you to stop.

For a week and a half in April that assumption is suspended. The garden fills, the crowd moves at its own pace, the lanterns stay on into the night, and a place made for measured looking turns into somewhere you shuffle through with everyone else. It goes back to itself afterwards. But the decision to open it, rather than to charge more, says something about what the garden is understood to be for.