The blossom here is red. Not the pale wash you expect from a Japanese spring, but something closer to wine. Takato grows a cherry that grows nowhere else: takato-kohigan, a variety native to this single valley, its flowers smaller and deeper in color than the familiar somei-yoshino. Some fifteen hundred of them open at once across the slope of an old castle, and from a distance the hillside looks faintly bruised, as if the mountain had been touched with rouge. The castle itself is gone. What remains is stonework, the outline of a moat, a red bridge over nothing. When the domain was dissolved in the nineteenth century, its former samurai planted these trees on the grounds where horses had once been trained—an act of mourning, perhaps, or simply of having nowhere else to put their grief. The trees took, and kept taking, for a century and a half. Locals call it the finest cherry in the land, and standing here, with the snow of the Central Alps behind a drifting cloud of red, you find the claim hard to argue with. Takato sits high, so its peak comes late, after the lowlands have finished. It is a place where spring is offered a second time, to anyone who climbs for it.