Seven thousand cherry trees in the grounds of one temple. That is the figure Wakayama's tourism authority gives for Negoroji, and it is an order of magnitude beyond what a temple planting normally means anywhere in the country. Negoroji has around nine hundred years of history and is the head temple of the Shingi Shingon school, founded by Kakuban, a scholar-monk who came down from Koyasan to establish it.

The flowering runs from late March into the first days of April, and there are weeping cherries among them, pale pink and moving in any wind.

Seven thousand is a great deal more than the word precinct can hold.

This is not a temple with a few cherry trees in the garden, the way most temples on this list are. It is closer to a hillside that happens to have a temple inside it, and walking the grounds you lose track of where the boundary was supposed to be: you are among trees, then among buildings, then among trees again, without ever having passed through a gate that told you which was which. Nine hundred years turns out to be long enough for the distinction between a temple and the land it sits on to stop being obvious to anybody walking through it.