Eighty-one hectares. Koganei Park sits in the western half of Tokyo and covers about 810,000 square metres, which is large enough that the cherry trees in it are not really one thing. There are roughly fourteen hundred of them, of some fifty varieties, including yama-zakura, sato-zakura and oshima-zakura, which between them stretch the flowering across about a month.

About four hundred of them are gathered in one place, an area called the Sakura no Sono, the cherry garden. That leaves a thousand elsewhere.

The other thousand are scattered through the rest of the park, which changes what hanami means here. You do not go to the cherry trees so much as keep meeting them: on the way to somewhere else, at the edge of a lawn, behind a hedge you were walking past.

The crowds concentrate in the Sakura no Sono, and because the park is so large, walking five minutes in any direction from it gets you a space to sit. The Edo-Tokyo Open Air Architectural Museum is inside the same grounds, a collection of old buildings moved here from around the city, and there are cherry trees standing among those too. The timing given on this page is not the park's; it comes from the weather record for Tokyo.