This park was also built to remember the dead. Muramatsu Park was laid out in October 1906 as a memorial to the Russo-Japanese War, according to Niigata prefecture, and covers 37.3 hectares in the hills east of the Echigo plain. There are about three thousand cherry trees, roughly nine in ten of them Somei-yoshino, with darker varieties such as yoko-zakura mixed in among them for colour.

Kinugasayama Park in Yokosuka, on the Pacific coast, was planted for the same reason the following year, in 1907, and is also on the list of a hundred.

So the same decision was made twice, a year apart, at opposite ends of the country: after a war, plant cherry trees.

Both places are now somewhere families go in April with mats and lunch boxes, and most of the people who go do not know the reason the trees are there. That is not a failure of memory so much as what happens to a memorial that works: it stops being a monument and becomes a place. The trees outlasted the reason. Whether the people who planted them expected this particular afterlife, a hundred and twenty years on, is not recorded. The timing given on this page is not the prefecture's; it comes from the weather record for Niigata.