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 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 work, where flat planes of color register against carved outlines rather than dissolving into atmospheric 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 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.