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The Last Supper
(print, 1981)
The menu for Sadao Watanabe’s version of The Last Supper is unlike any other in art history. Jesus is placed at the head of a low table among his kimono-clad disciples as they kneel on a tatami mat and prepare to partake of a traditional Japanese meal. The charming large-eyed fish at the center of the table is the sea bream, or tai, a much-prized delicacy that is normally served on ceremonial occasions. It is accompanied by plates of sushi rolls and stylized bottles of sake.
As with actors in the Japanese Noh theater tradition, the faces of the figures in this print are masklike and impassive, as is the case in all Watanabe’s pictures. The position of the hands of his figures gives more clues to their emotional state than their faces, which is one of the ways that Watanabe creates an aura of reserved quiet and dignity in his work. Following Western art traditions, Jesus, with a halo around his head, is slightly larger than the disciples in order to indicate his importance. The “beloved disciple,” John, leans upon Jesus with affection while others gesticulate or fold their hands in an attitude of prayer. Judas can be seen in the foreground, clutching a bag of money behind his back. In a playful commentary, Watanabe adorned Judas’s kimono with the symbol of the fox, a traditional Japanese symbol of bedevilment.
Watanabe suggests that this was the kind of meal that would be served to Jesus as an honored guest if he were to visit a Japanese home in our own time. With this fresh vision of the Last Supper he wedded the East and the West, just as he did in hundreds of other biblical prints he created during his life. He took the familiar stories and symbols of Christianity, sometimes even borrowing poses from medieval and Renaissance masters, and reimagined them as distinctly Japanese, using the traditional Japanese medium of printmaking.
One day, while browsing the shelves in a Christian bookstore in Tokyo, Watanabe was struck by the fact that the covers of most of the books were decorated with European religious art. There seemed to be little art available that represented the Christian faith in the visual language of the Japanese, and he wanted to find a way to communicate the message of Christ to those in his own culture, for whom its stories and teachings were largely unfamiliar. Perhaps, by giving these images a distinctly Japanese flavor, he could overcome some of the stigma toward Christianity. “I wanted to find a way of expressing my Christianity within a Japanese context instead of just adapting the European tradition,” he said.1 And so, Watanabe’s prints were created in a style that accords with Japanese ideas of beauty but illustrates people and events of the biblical story.
Watanabe summed up his artistic passions in this way: “I owe my life to Christ and the gospel. My way of expressing my gratitude is to witness to my faith through the medium of biblical scenes. I want to use my ideas and talents for the glory of God.”2
Sadao Watanabe was born in Tokyo in 1913, the son of a Christian father and Buddhist mother. His father did not attend church with any regularity or speak directly of his faith, but his son would sometimes overhear him quietly singing a hymn as he walked in the family garden: “There is a fountain filled with blood, drawn from Emmanuel’s veins.” When his father died unexpectedly, the young Watanabe, only ten, was forced to drop out of school to help with the family finances and had to put his dreams of becoming an artist on hold.
A kindly woman from the neighborhood felt sorry for the quiet, artistic boy who had lost his father and invited Watanabe to come to church with her. At first he was not much attracted to Christianity, finding it to have “the smell of butter” (a Japanese expression for something foreign and unpleasant). He moved toward belief slowly, spending considerable time comparing Christian and Buddhist scriptures. It was not primarily this intellectual investigation, however, that ultimately brought him to faith in Christ but rather a miraculous recovery from tuberculosis—which had kept him bedridden for two years. Members of the church prayed for his healing, and following this answer to prayer he decided, at age seventeen, to be baptized. His formerly Buddhist mother was baptized shortly thereafter. In a culture where only about 1 percent of the population practiced Christianity, and where standing out in any way was frowned upon, his decision to publicly identify with Christ was evidence of the seriousness with which he embraced his new faith.
The Last Supper by Sadao Watanabe, from the collection of Anne Pyle [Courtesy of Anne Pyle]
By age twenty-four Watanabe was working as a textile dyer, designing patterns and dyeing cloth for kimonos, doing some occasional drawing, and studying the writings of Soetsu Yanagi, a proponent of minigei, the Japanese folk art movement. Yanagi celebrated the traditional arts and crafts of ordinary Japanese people and encouraged the embrace of time-honored techniques. These interests led Watanabe to the work of a textile dye artist named Keisuke Serizawa, who became his teacher and taught him how to use these same techniques with paper to create prints. At first he made some prints of Bible stories solely for his own enjoyment, but eventually came to the realization that this should become his calling.
This method of printmaking, which Watanabe perfected and used throughout his career as an artist, involved a laborious process of drawing, stenciling, and cutting out patterns that could then be printed and accented with colors. All the materials he used were natural, including the paper (made from the bark of mulberry trees), which would be kneaded, crumpled, rolled, and stretched, giving it a wrinkled and weathered appearance almost like a medieval manuscript.
Despite the complexity of his organic method for creating the prints, Watanabe was astonishingly prolific, creating over five hundred large prints and hundreds of smaller ones. The overwhelming majority of these prints were of biblical scenes, encompassing many Old Testament stories as well as almost every major event in the life of Christ. Among his favorite stories, explored in multiple variations, were the Last Supper and the flight into Egypt. He also clearly took great relish in images of animals, as evidenced in his many and varied depictions of Noah’s ark, and in the many species of birds that crop up as little accents in so many different prints. When, on rare occasions, he departed from directly biblical subjects, it would be to explore other Christian themes, such as St. Francis Preaching to the Birds, or to design a unique portrait of John Calvin.
Watanabe was a diligent student of the Bible, immersing himself in its pages daily and praying that it would provide the inspiration and direction for his creations. He would read the biblical text relating to his subject over and over, pondering its message prayerfully, before he executed the design. For him, the creation of his prints was not only an artistic endeavor but also an act of worship. He would pray during each stage of his creative process.
Watanabe struggled for recognition and acceptance as an artist. In the years following the Second World War, Japanese art critics began to distinguish between fine art and “applied” art, and there was much disagreement about how to define the differences. Because Watanabe was using traditional folk methods, some critics refused to take his work seriously as fine art. But because it had many of the characteristics of high art, some folk art aficionados didn’t feel his work belonged with theirs either. He was often refused entrance into shows that showcased one or the other—his work too much a hybrid for either artistic community to fully embrace.
In 1947 Watanabe finally found some recognition when he entered one of his biblical prints, The Story of Ruth, in a contest at the Japanese Folk Art Museum and was awarded a first prize. The next year he received a prize from the Japanese Print Association. Other than that, he gained very little fame in his own country. But slowly, over time, he developed an international following after novelist James Michener discovered Watanabe’s work and included some of his art in a published collection of modern Japanese prints. His work was eventually exhibited in the United States at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, at the British Museum in London, and at the Vatican Museum for Modern Religious Art in Rome, where ten of his works are on permanent display. During the Lyndon Johnson administration one of his prints even adorned a wall in the White House.
The humble Watanabe, though, was less interested in seeing his work hang in these prestigious institutions than in having it understood and embraced by his fellow Japanese. He once said of his prints, “I would like to see them hanging where people ordinarily gather, because Jesus Christ brought the Gospel for the people.”3
It is perhaps appropriate that in 1996 the hard-working Sadao Watanabe died in the process of creating his art, his heart giving out while in the process of numbering and signing a batch of prints. Those who knew him speak of his gentle humility and passionate faith, a follower of Jesus who wanted to express to his own culture the faith that was central to his life. He wanted to make himself available so that God might use his gifts, which meant that he must himself get out of the way and let God work through him. “As I grow older,” he said near the end of his life, “my work becomes less of myself and more of my Lord.”4