Hanami here is not done by looking up. Around Inokashira pond there are some two hundred Somei-yoshino and yama-zakura, and about four hundred trees in the park as a whole, according to the city. They stand at the edge of the water, and their branches grow out over it rather than up.

There are rowing boats for hire on the pond, and taking one out is the whole point of coming here rather than to any other park in the city.

Take one out and the trees come at you from the side. You pass under branches instead of standing beneath them, and because the boat sits low, the flowers are level with your eyes or slightly below, which is not where anyone expects cherry blossom to be. Four hundred trees is not a large number by Tokyo standards; the arrangement is what makes it worth the trip.

The water has the same flowers in it, upside down and moving. For a few minutes in the middle of the pond you have blossom above the gunwale and blossom below it and nothing much else in view, which is a different experience from a crowded lawn and takes about a thousand yen and half an hour. The timing given on this page is not the city's; no average peak is published, so it comes from the weather record for Tokyo.