Fifteen hundred cherry trees on a slope above the sea. Senkoji Park climbs the side of Senkojiyama at Onomichi, and the city's tourism site counts about fifteen hundred trees there: Somei-yoshino, weeping and double varieties, and some rarer kinds among them. The flowering runs from late March into the first days of April, early for the region.

Onomichi itself is a narrow strip of town squeezed between the mountain and the water.

The hill rises steeply, the railway and the town are packed into the ground immediately below it, and below that is the channel with its islands and its shipping.

Which means that looking down through the blossom here, you get roofs first, then the strait, then the islands on the far side, and quite often a coastal freighter working its way through the middle of the view. Very few famous cherry sites in Japan put a working sea lane at the bottom of the frame, and fewer still put a town's rooftops between you and it. The city's phrase for it is hanami in keeping with a town of literature, which is a reference to the writers who lived and worked here and to the path of literary monuments that runs across the hill.