Hollyhock Hill (Aoizaka) — 葵坂

Hollyhock Hill (Aoizaka) is a Tokyo print by Inoue Yasuji that climbs the slope of Aoizaka, a hill in the Akasaka district whose name preserved the older meaning of aoi as hollyhock and whose curve had been a recognized urban landmark since the Edo period. Inoue Yasuji frames the road in a deep upward perspective, with stone retaining walls and bordering trees on either side, pedestrians and rickshaws moving up the grade, and a strip of evening sky carrying the bokashi gradient that signals his kosen-ga lineage from Kobayashi Kiyochika. As with his other Tokyo Famous Places sheets, the choice of subject is itself part of the argument: a residential slope, rather than a monumental gate or shrine, is treated with full meisho seriousness, expanding the canon of what counted as a famous place in late nineteenth-century Tokyo. The print's tonal control, especially the way the road surface is graded from warmer foreground browns to cooler distance, shows how Meiji prints could deploy bokashi printing to suggest atmosphere and time of day without resorting to dramatic effects. The ukiyo-e.org archive preserves this impression, where it remains a reference image for studies of Inoue Yasuji's quieter cityscape mode and for collectors interested in how his designs prefigured the equally restrained Tokyo views produced by later shin-hanga artists.