The cherry trees are not confined to the park. The Okazaki tourism association counts about eight hundred Somei-yoshino across the castle grounds and the two rivers that run beside them, the Otogawa and the Igagawa, treating the whole thing as one planting rather than as a park with some trees near it.

The castle trees and the river trees do not work the same way at all.

At the castle you look at blossom with a keep behind it, which is the standard arrangement in Japan and the one that ends up on the posters. It is a composed view and it composes itself. Along the Igagawa, which is narrow, the branches from both banks meet overhead and close into a tunnel, and there is no monument in the frame at all, only water underneath and branches over your head.

So a single afternoon in one town gives you two quite different versions of the same species: blossom as the setting for a building, and blossom as a corridor with nothing in it but more blossom. During the festival the trees are lit from six in the evening until nine, which mainly benefits the river stretch: lamps under a tunnel of branches do something that lamps in an open park cannot. The timing given on this page is not the association's; it comes from the weather record for Nagoya.