The castle comes second here. The blossoms come first. Hirosaki Park holds some twenty-six hundred cherry trees, and many are old—older than the festival, older than most who come to stand beneath them. What makes them strange is the pruning. The orchardists of Aomori, a province that lives by its apples, learned to cut a fruit tree so that every branch carries weight, and somewhere along the way they turned that knowledge on the cherries. The result is a blossom denser than seems reasonable: low, heavy, dropping to the height of a person, so you walk through the flowers rather than under them. Then the petals fall. They fall into the moat, and the moat changes color, and a word exists for this—hanaikada, a raft of flowers—because people here have looked long enough to name it. Some who return each year say the trees are best not at full bloom but a few days after, when the water has gone pale and the falling has become the point. On a still morning the moat doubles the blossom: once above, once below. At night the keep floats on its own light. Far off, Mount Iwaki keeps its snow. Spring reaches Hirosaki three weeks later than Tokyo, so the peak comes in early May, when much of the country has already moved on. There is something to be said for a place still waiting.