These trees are named after a person. The Hyakujuro cherries take their name from Ichikawa Hyakujuro, a kabuki actor born in the town, who according to Gifu prefecture donated them to mark the completion of the Sakaigawa flood channel. There are over a thousand of them along about four kilometres of the Shinsakai embankment, and they flower from the end of March into the first days of April.

A flood channel is a river dug so that another river does not overflow, which is a piece of civil engineering rather than a landscape.

When the digging was finished, an actor gave the town cherry trees. It is not the response most people would predict. The same thing happened at the Ohkouzu diversion in Niigata, where the planting was made in tribute to the works, by different people in a different decade.

It seems to be a recognised way of marking the end of a piece of water engineering in Japan: not a plaque, not a statue, but a line of trees along the thing you built, which will be at its best for one week a year for the next century. Walk the embankment in early April and there is a river on one side and a town on the other, and the reason both are dry is underneath your feet.