The trees stand in a single line along the top of an embankment. Kumagaya Sakurazutsumi is two kilometres of the Arakawa flood bank planted with about five hundred Somei-yoshino, and because it is a flood bank the path is straight and raised. The river is on one side and the town is on the other, and you are looking at two unrelated things at once for the entire walk.

The city gives the flowering as late March into the first days of April. The Kumagaya cherry festival falls in the same window, and the trees are lit after dark. It is one of the earlier places in the Kanto plain to come out, early enough that people who work in Tokyo can get here before their own neighbourhood has started.

A line of cherry trees does not behave like a park full of them. There is no canopy to stand under and no clearing to sit in. You cannot really stop; the path carries you along it, and the trees arrive one after another rather than all at once.

What you get instead is perspective. Stand at one end and look along the bank: the trees narrow as they go, the white thins out, and at some point that you cannot quite identify it stops being cherry blossom and becomes embankment. At night, with the lights on, that line lifts off the dark water beside it and hangs there, and the far end of it is somewhere you cannot see.