This entry on the list of a hundred is not a park but a road. Kumamoto prefecture describes a driving route with cherry trees running about five kilometres along the Shiranui Sea, some 500 trees in all. The peak falls from late March into early April, and at the height of it a viewing boat is planned from Yunoko hot spring, so the avenue can be looked at from the water rather than driven through.

Five kilometres of roadside trees is a maintenance problem.

Minamata city keeps a page asking people to take part in preserving the line through a corporate donation scheme, and says the money goes towards planting cherry trees and felling growth that gets in the way. That is a plain statement of something most cherry sites leave unsaid: an avenue of this length does not stay standing on its own, and somebody has to pay for the part of it that is work rather than scenery.

The road is also the reason the trees are where they are. A park can be laid out around its planting, but a coastal route is drawn by the shape of the shore, and the cherry trees were put alongside a line that already existed for other reasons. What a visitor gets is therefore not a designed view but a long one, changing continuously for five kilometres, with the sea on one side the whole way. It is closer to a stretch of coast that happens to flower than to a garden that happens to be near water.