Only a hundred and ninety trees. Shimane prefecture gives the count for Matsue Jozan Park as about a hundred and ninety cherries, mostly Somei-yoshino, planted in the main bailey. Against the rest of this list, where a thousand trees is ordinary and several thousand is common enough, that is a very small number indeed. The flowering runs from late March into the first days of April, at the same time as most of western Japan.

What the park has instead of numbers is the keep.

Matsue castle is one of the twelve original keeps still standing anywhere in Japan, and it was designated a National Treasure in 2015, four centuries after it was built.

So this is not a site that works by mass, and it does not try to. There is no tunnel to walk through and no hillside gone pink at a distance. There are individual trees, and behind them a dark wooden building four hundred years old, and the relationship between the two is the whole of what you have come to look at. A hundred and ninety is few enough that you could, over a couple of visits, learn where each one stands. Having more of something and being able to see it properly are not, it turns out, the same thing.