This one is better known after dark. Takadajo Park holds about four thousand cherry trees, and standing among them is the reconstructed three-storey turret of Takada castle. When the light goes, paper lanterns come on through the grounds and the turret and the trees are lit together, which is the image the place is known for and the one that fills the car parks.

A footpath runs the whole way round the outer moat, which is where most of the trees are.

Because there is water, the lanterns and the flowers appear a second time underneath. Lantern light is not white; it carries some red in it, so the blossom at night is a different colour from the blossom at four in the afternoon, and photographs of the two barely look like the same trees, let alone the same evening.

In summer the same moat fills completely with lotus. So the water spends April holding the reflection of flowers and July being covered by them, and in neither season is it doing what a castle moat was dug to do. The flowering comes in the first half of April and runs into the middle of the month. Water dug to keep an army out now spends the year holding whatever is flowering above it.