This is a road rather than a park. Around fourteen hundred Somei-yoshino line three and a half kilometres of it, running from Route 353 up the southern flank of Mount Akagi to a hot spring called Chuji Onsen. Maebashi city gives the flowering as April; the city's tourism association narrows it to early and mid April.

Because the road climbs, the trees do not open together. The lower end starts while the upper end is still shut, and for a few days in the middle of the season you can drive the whole length and watch the flowering run backwards through the windscreen. It is a slow drive at that time of year. Everyone else is doing the same thing.

Beside the avenue there is a second planting, a wood rather than a line, with about five hundred trees of thirty-seven varieties. Thirty-seven is a lot for five hundred trees. It means the wood holds a longer season than the road next to it, and a wider range of colour, and considerably fewer people.

The road is what the visitors come for, and the wood is where they end up when the road is full. Both are the same site. Mount Akagi rises behind all of it, and the general rule of the place is that the higher you go the later everything happens, which is worth knowing if you arrive and find the bottom already dropping its petals.