There is more to see from this park than in it. Oboshi Park holds about two thousand cherry trees, Somei-yoshino and sato-zakura and weeping varieties among them, and Yamanashi prefecture gives the flowering as late March into the first days of April.

The park stands high above the valley floor, and the Fuji river runs directly below it.

According to the prefecture, the view from inside takes in the river, Mount Fuji, the townscape of the Kofu basin, and beyond that the Yatsugatake range and the mountains of Okuchichibu. That is a great deal of country to have arranged behind two thousand trees.

The effect is that this reads less like a famous cherry site than like a viewing platform that happens to have cherry trees on it. People come for the blossom and find themselves facing outward, naming peaks. The flowers are three metres away and the things they are framing are forty kilometres away, and the eye keeps moving between the two without settling. A cherry festival is held here in step with the flowering, timed to the trees rather than to the calendar. Come on a clear day. On a grey one you get two thousand cherry trees and a wall of cloud, which is a different and much smaller thing.