Wedding at Cana, Watanabe Sadao, stencil print on paper, 1968, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis.
Born in 1913, Watanabe Sadao converted to Christianity in 1930 after he recovered from tuberculosis. American Protestant missionaries in Japan emphasized the primacy of the word over images so there was very little religious art that spoke to Japanese Christians. In the 1940s Watenabe started working in stencil print techniques. Influenced by Buddhist figure prints and the new folk art movement in Japan, Watanabe started portraying biblical stories in a Japanese context.
