Watanabe Sadao never made art for popes and presidents. He made art for the humble Christian home. His simple style was not an affectation, but a true expression of his Christian faith. Like his father’s hymns, Watanabe’s prints were for living a Christian day, not for achieving artistic glory.

Anyone who lived through the last few decades of the twentieth century in the West will remember how quickly a once-monumental civilization turned into an aesthetic wasteland.

In my own lifetime I remember the green felt banners covering the walls in our brick-box church as the Novus Ordo spirit listed through the liturgy. Not far from where I grew up, there were grand cathedrals from an earlier age, spires tickling the low hem of the sky and magnificent stained-glass windows filling the pews with heaven in kaleidoscopic form. But in mine and a thousand other Western cities and towns, the grandeur of yesteryear was traded in for blandness: the architectural and aesthetic vocabulary of civilizational despair.

Even as a child I remember the reaction I had to the dumbing-down of Mass, both in the liturgy and in the decorative elements of the sanctuary. I shuddered contemplating the felt banners, the weirdly angular and even willfully ugly depictions of the saints and angels, the Holy Ghost turned into a geometric scissors-and-glue abstraction of a common bird. I craved the elevated and the sublime. I did not want to see another homespun monstrosity for as long as I lived.

Late last year, a friend shared with me the work of Watanabe Sadao (1913-1996). Watanabe is a Japanese artist, one of the most well-known popular artists of the twentieth century here. His métier is just the kind of stylized church art that I have spent my life actively disliking. Watanabe is renowned as a painter of Biblical scenes, but his Apostles and Jesuses and Good Samaritans are done in precisely the folksy, primitive rusticity that so lulled me to sleep as I sat in Masses as a surly youth. Check out Watanabe’s style for yourself: Pinterest is filled with his prints, and a simple Google Images search for “渡辺禎雄” will bring up dozens more. When my friend introduced Watanabe’s work to me, I thought, “Oh, no—not another felt-banner Grandma Moses!”

But then I began to look a little more closely. Watanabe’s work is not felt banners, first of all, but more accurately textile printing. Watanabe was the student of the great Serizawa Keisuke (1895-1984), a textile artist who won acclaim in Japan and abroad for his work in the mingei, or folk arts, movement. Watanabe’s art may appear unrefined, but it is in reality the product of a great deal of talent, practice, tutelage, and skill. Watanabe and Pablo Picasso were very, very different artists, but both shared a love for the primitive concealing a lifetime of artistic sweat and tears. Neither Watanabe nor Picasso could be accused of not knowing what they were doing.

However, much more than the hidden depths of his oeuvre, what really struck me about Watanabe was his Christian faith. Christianity is rare in Japan, and despite centuries of proselytization Christianity never became more than a very minor outlier in Japan’s religious landscape. But as author Kanda Kenji has pointed out, there have been quite a few other Christian mingei artists, such as Asakawa Takumi, Yanagi Muneyoshi (aka Soetsu), and Tonomura Kichinosuke. So, Watanabe’s having been a Christian artist in the mingei tradition is not an unheard-of phenomenon.

In particular, I was moved by how Watanabe became a Christian. Kanda quotes Watanabe’s recollections of his own father—how the elder Watanabe, although he died early in Sadao’s life, nevertheless managed to instill a kind of Christianity in his son.

“The truth of it is,” Watanabe said, “my father was a Christian. Even as a boy I used to watch my dad. I never once saw him attend any church. It seems he was baptized at a church somewhere when he was young. The one thing that sticks in my memory, though, is that whenever my father did anything he was always humming songs of praise. In the evening, when he came home from work and was puttering around in the garden with his bonsai plants, for instance, he would hum Even the thief on the cross / looked on this wellspring and was glad / We also dive deep into the wellspring / and all our scarlet sins are to be seen no more.”

Kanda thinks that the fact that Sadao’s father was a Christian laid a very important groundwork for Sadao’s own path later in life. I agree.

Watanabe Sadao came from a poor household, Kanda’s essay continues. His father died at the age of 43 in January of 1923, just eight months before a massive earthquake leveled much of the Watanabe’s city of Tokyo. His family had so little money, especially after that devastating year, that Sadao had to quit attending middle school. He stayed in his house and drew pictures, Kanda writes. The loss of his father was a heavy blow. But Sadao was invited at age ten to a church by a Christian elementary school teacher named Ohta Hanako. He began to read the Bible, and eventually his mother joined him in church. Watanabe Sadao was baptized in 1930.

Surely it was a blessing that the elder Watanabe had been a Christian. Without doubt, this prepared his son’s heart to accept the Gospel when the time was right. It is difficult to imagine that Sadao was not thinking also of his earthly father as he read in the Bible about his Father in heaven. Watanabe Sadao’s talent for art grew in the tangle of loss and salvation, poverty and agape, that was his childhood in a Christian home. As an adult, Sadao never painted a monumental canvas. In each of his works one can perhaps faintly hear, if one is listening, the sound of his father’s Christian hymns being hummed, filling a poor home with Christian love.

As I have learned about Watanabe Sadao, I’ve come to see what a gift his example is. Later in life he was lauded by the art world, and some of his pieces were even purchased by the Vatican and the White House. But Watanabe never made art for popes and presidents. He made art for the humble Christian home. His simple style was not an affectation, but a true expression of his Christian faith. He thought that every Christian home should have images from the Bible. Like his father’s hymns, Watanabe’s prints were for living a Christian day, not for achieving artistic glory.

How badly we need Christian homes now. How important it is to be able to hear a father humming a Christian song while he works in the garden. How indispensable to know that one’s mother believes in the resurrection of the body, the forgiveness of sins, and the life of the world to come. A child may cry for toys and candy, but when the child is older, he or she will want nothing more than to repent and believe in the Gospel. That is hard enough for anyone—the memory of a father’s song, a mother’s prayer, may just be enough to bring a lost soul home.

In an age of idols, hatred, mockery, grandstanding, and greed, how powerful is the Christian home—the poor, upended, nearly ruined Christian home in earthquake-ravaged Japan, the home which saved Watanabe Sadao in the end.

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