There is a vermilion hall standing in the middle of the lake. Mobara Park holds more than two thousand cherry trees, most of them ringing Lake Benten, and out in the water is Bentendo, a small hall painted the orange-red that Japanese shrines use, posts and roof and railings all of it.

Cherry blossom is white, or close to it. Vermilion is about as far from white as a colour gets while still being warm. Chiba prefecture gives the flowering as the last week of March into the first days of April.

The lake doubles everything. You get the white and the red above the waterline and the same pair inverted below it, two arrangements of the same two colours, one of them slightly wrong. The reflected version is the one people photograph, which is a little unfair on the original.

When the wind picks up only the lower one breaks. The hall shatters into orange pieces and reassembles itself, while the flowers above it do not move at all. The same object behaves in two ways at once, depending on which side of the waterline you are looking at. The Mobara cherry festival runs from late March into the middle of April, and after dark the trees are lit, which changes the red again into something closer to brown at the edges and brighter at the centre.