Three thousand trees across a hundred and five hectares. Osaka Castle Park covers 105.6 hectares in the middle of the city and holds about three thousand cherry trees, mostly Somei-yoshino, according to the park itself. Around three hundred of those are concentrated in the Nishinomaru garden, which stays open into the evening during the viewing season.

The other twenty-seven hundred are spread out among the moats and the stone walls, with no particular centre.

That makes hanami here a question of where to stand rather than whether to come.

If you want the keep in the picture you go to Nishinomaru and pay for it. If you want space you go to the outer moat on the eastern side and get neither the tower nor the crowd. The walls are high enough that the amount of visible sky changes as you move, and the same variety of tree reads differently against grey stone than it does with the city behind it. What this place has that most others on the list do not is simply scale, and it has it in the middle of a city of two and a half million people, which is the harder trick. The timing given here is not the park's; it comes from the weather record for Osaka.