On Yoshino, the blossom climbs. Some thirty thousand cherry trees cover this mountain, divided by altitude into four belts—lower, middle, upper, and innermost—and they do not bloom together. They bloom in sequence, from the foot of the mountain upward, the flowering taking more than a week to ascend the slope. To watch Yoshino is to watch spring itself move, slowly, uphill. This was a sacred mountain long before it was a famous one. A center of Shugendo, the old mountain asceticism, its cherries were never planted to be admired. They were offerings, given to the deity Zao Gongen, replanted generation after generation across a thousand years. What you see is not a garden but an accumulation of prayer that happened, over centuries, to become a landscape. Knowing this changes the white slope. These are not trees for looking at but trees for giving away, and the difference, once you feel it, is hard to unfeel. There is a phrase in Japanese—hitome senbon, a thousand trees at a glance. On Yoshino the glance comes four times, and the mountain takes its time delivering each one.