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](/glossary/meisho-e) in the [sosaku-hanga](/glossary/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](/glossary/bokashi) for sky or distant water, a technique that gives his cityscapes a graphic clarity distinct from the atmospheric [shin-hanga](/glossary/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.