This park was built to commemorate a royal visit. Kurayoshi city records that Utsubuki Park was laid out in 1904 to mark a journey through the San'in region by the crown prince who later became Emperor Taisho. Hiryukaku, the building still standing in the grounds, was put up to accommodate him, and is now a registered tangible cultural property.

The cherry trees came later, and they came in instalments rather than all at once.

The city's own account gives 1966, when a thousand cherries and five hundred azaleas were planted, and then 2004, the park's centenary, when another hundred cherries went in.

Read those dates together and you get something most park descriptions leave out entirely: a park is not made once and then finished. It is added to, at intervals of decades, by people who will not see the result. The trees planted for the centenary are now twenty-odd years old and still short enough to look past. Somebody will be sitting under them in 2060, and will not know the date they went in. The park stands at the foot of Utsubukiyama, the hill the town grew around. The timing given on this page is not the city's; it comes from the weather record for Tottori.