Aoyagi-cho Hakodate

Aoyagi-cho Hakodate depicts a neighborhood in the port city of Hakodate on the southern tip of Hokkaido, a region Sekino documented repeatedly as part of his lifelong engagement with the towns and folk culture of northern Japan. As a meisho-e in the sosaku-hanga idiom, the print likely renders a specific street scene — wooden houses, sloping lanes leading down toward the harbor, the distinctive mix of Meiji-era Western architecture and traditional Japanese forms that defines Hakodate. Sekino's town views typically combine firmly carved key blocks for architectural geometry with broad, flatly inked color areas and selective bokashi for sky or distant water, a technique that gives his cityscapes a graphic clarity distinct from the atmospheric shin-hanga landscapes of Hasui or Yoshida. The work belongs to the same northern-Japan project that produced his Aomori and Tohoku scenes, in which the artist — himself born in Aomori — used the woodblock to record vernacular places before postwar reconstruction altered them, treating regional identity as a serious subject for the creative print.