Reason No.  7: Two Rouault museums in downtown Tokyo.

Anybody who knows me knows that one of my working hypotheses is: “If you can’t make your point by quoting Bono or Dylan or C.S. Lewis — or if you can’t make your point by describing a Rouault painting, your point probably isn’t worth making.”

In downtown Tokyo there are not one but two museums given to the art of Georges Rouault, the Idemitsu Museum and the Shiodome Museum. The Idemitsu, in fact, is home to the gorgeous “Christ with Arms Raised” that graces the cover of With One Voice. So, I’ve been waiting for years to get to Japan to see firsthand my first Rouault paintings ever, and especially to admire “Christ with Arms Raised.”

You know where this is going.

Both museums, of course, were between major showings of Rouault’s works, so between the two museums there were but twelve paintings on display (which is exactly twelve more than I had ever been able to see except in art books). And naturally, “Christ with Arms Raised” will be “prominently displayed,” so we were assured, in the Idemitsu’s Rouault Retrospective which was to begin eleven days after we left Japan. Asked if there was any way we could see it anyway, we were politely rebuffed (everybody in Japan is exquisitely polite), “Sorry, it’s not even in the museum. It’s in our warehouse being prepped for the exhibition.”

But, my goodness, were the colors and the textures and the composition of the paintings we did get to see magnificent! I had no idea Rouault laid the paint on as thickly as he did. Or that his colors are really as vivid and as evocative as they are. Or that his clown faces could be as sad as they are up close. Or that his biblical landscapes could draw you in as effectively as they do.

My missionary friend Nancy Nethercott (she shows up in a later “Reason No. …”) and I talked about the attraction of Rouault’s vision for Japanese people — his sense of the way the sadness of life prompts hope for some sort of resolution from beyond, his sense of the way you can say more through less, something complex through simplicity of line and color. Maybe somebody needs to develop a series of lectures on “Georges Rouault and a Christian Apologetic for Japan.”