The moats survived. Takaoka castle lost its buildings long ago, but the water moats and the earth ramparts are still there, and the site is now a park of some two hundred and ten thousand square metres with about eighteen hundred cherry trees in it. The flowering runs from late March into the middle of April, which is a long window and reflects how many kinds are planted here.

Keeping the moats means keeping the water, and the water is what makes this park different from most castle sites.

At castles where a keep has been rebuilt, the cherry trees are photographed against the building, and the building usually wins. Here there is no building to lose to. The trees have only the water and the banked earth to work with, and they do more with it than they would with a keep behind them.

Stand at the edge of a moat and the flowers on the far side arrive twice, once in the air and once in the water, with nothing between them. The outline of the fortress is still readable, but you read it as the shape of the water rather than the shape of the walls, which is a slower and stranger way to be told what a place used to be than standing in front of a reconstruction.