Nikolai Cathedral

A view of the Holy Resurrection Cathedral in Tokyo's Ochanomizu district, the Russian Orthodox cathedral commonly known as Nikolai-do after its founder, Archbishop Nikolai of Japan. Completed in 1891 and rebuilt after the 1923 Kanto earthquake, its Byzantine dome and bell tower offered Hiratsuka Un'ichi a subject of unusual architectural geometry within Tokyo's skyline. The print likely uses his characteristic carved black-line vocabulary to render dome curvature, masonry courses, and window arches through massed inked planes set against reserved [washi](/glossary/washi). Western and non-Japanese religious architecture appears periodically across Hiratsuka's enormous body of work, sitting alongside his more numerous Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines and confirming his interest in built form as a category rather than in any single sectarian tradition. The image extends his architectural project—begun in earnest in the 1930s and continued through his decades teaching in the United States after 1962—into a structure that visually marks the cosmopolitan religious history of modern Tokyo.