These trees were planted as a memorial. Yokosuka city's account is specific: in 1907 a monument was raised to the men of the city who died in the Russo-Japanese War, and cherry trees were planted at the same time. There are about two thousand of them on the hill now, and for most of the year nobody thinks about why.

That makes the origin here different from most famous cherry sites, which were planted for pleasure, or for a lord, or to hold a riverbank together.

Nearly a hundred and twenty years on, the hill fills up every April for the Kinugasa cherry festival, and it is a loud, ordinary, cheerful sort of hanami with food stalls and families and a view over the town and the sea from the top.

The monument is still there, somewhere among the two thousand. Most people walk past it without looking, and the ones who know it is there are usually looking at the flowers anyway. It is not a sad place and nobody is asking you to treat it as one. But the reason the trees exist and the use they are put to have come apart over a century, which is worth a minute's thought on the way up. The timing given on this page is not the city's; it comes from the weather record for Yokohama.