Orthodox church in Hakodate

This print depicts the Hakodate Resurrection Cathedral, the white-walled Russian Orthodox church whose green onion domes have anchored the Motomachi slope above the harbor since its 1916 reconstruction. As a native of Hokkaido, Maeda returned repeatedly to the architecture and weather of his home island, and Hakodate — with its layered history of Russian, Chinese, and Western contact — gave him subjects that lay outside the standard [meisho-e](/glossary/meisho-e) repertoire of Honshu. The cathedral's bell tower, cruciform plan, and tiered roofs invite the kind of geometric block-cutting Maeda favored in his [sosaku-hanga](/glossary/sosaku-hanga) work, where flat planes of color register against carved outlines rather than dissolving into atmospheric [bokashi](/glossary/bokashi). A print of this subject would typically pair the chalk-white facade against the deep greens of the surrounding cypress and the slate of a northern sky, exploiting the contrast [washi](/glossary/washi) accepts so cleanly. The image belongs to a small body of Hakodate views Maeda produced across his career, returning to the same townscape with the patient attention sosaku-hanga artists brought to familiar local motifs.