Four kilometres of cherry trees along the edge of a lake, on a road that goes nowhere in particular. The planting at Kaizu-Osaki follows the shore road on the northern side of Lake Biwa. The Takashima tourism association counts about eight hundred Somei-yoshino, from trees well over eighty years old down to recent replacements; the city gives about six hundred over the same stretch, so the counting differs. Recent peaks have fallen in the first part of April, though the association notes that weather moves it either way.

The colour sits in a band between the blue of the lake on one side and the green of the Higashiyama hills on the other, which is the description the city itself uses.

What makes this site unusual within Kansai is that it is late. The association says so plainly.

Kyoto and Osaka finish first, and by the time people there have decided the season is over, the north shore of Biwa is still going. It is a way of watching the cherry front move north without crossing a prefectural boundary to do it: an hour on a train from a city where the petals are already down, to a road where they are not. The trees do not care that the season has been declared over.