Jesuit priest Father Aguilar had negotiated a commission with a Catholic Church to replace the imitation station glass with the real thing. The designs were by a famous artist in Nagasaki. What I understood the priest to want was as exact a reproduction of the original designs as possible. We met the ailing artist when the priest ordered the windows. The artist was in the hospital at that time, I understood enough Japanese at that time follow the priest's promise that the replacement windows would follow the original design as faithfully as possible. All I had to go on were photos of the failing imitation windows.About six months later I delivered the windows. Father Aguilar was anxious to see them and immediately insisted that I show him what they looked like.
He was anxious to see the windows for Motohara Catholic Church. I was anxious to see if they had traveled safely.
I lifted the first window out of the box far enough to see it. It was not broken. Father Aguilar blanched. “May we take it all the way out of the box please?” he asked quietly. His entire demeanor suddenly changed.
I stood the window along the wall in the table tennis room next to the basement garage. I removed window after window, all sixteen of them. The designs were very simple, as if taken directly from a Bible coloring book. I had photographed them in place at the church and had projected them to the correct size so they were as close to the original drawings as physically possible to make them. Facial features were simple. Lines for the nose, mouth and eyes were simple. The faces and hands were done in flesh tones. Robes and backgrounds were earthy reds, bright blues and yellows.
“I told him that you could make the faces very realistic with many small pieces,” he said almost angrily. “This is not what I described to him.”
“You neglected to translate exactly what you did promise him then. It was my understanding that he wanted them to be as exactly like the originals as possible.”
“But the originals are not great art. They are just like a child’s book. It is a waste of the glass!” He said emphatically.
“Are you saying that you think he will reject them? That he won’t like them?”
“That is exactly what I am saying. This is not what I promised to him.”
“But, I thought we had promised Mr. Nagato, the artist, that we would not change his drawings.”
“But, the imitation glass company did not do a good job of translating his designs,” he said.
“I never saw the original designs,” I countered.
“But, I thought that you could improve on what you saw.”
“When can we show them to him? Can we ask him to come here now?”
I had a premonition that if Aguilar had a chance to talk with him and set the seed of doubt on the designs, and if he pulled his support from them, I was in real trouble. The sooner the priest saw them and with the fewer pre-conceived doubts, the better.
“Unfortunately he is not here at this time. He is in retreat and will not be back at the church until Monday. You must wait until that time.”
“So what are you going to recommend to him, if he asks for your recommendation?” I asked.
“I must live in Nagasaki. I have a responsibility to my church and my colleagues. I also have an obligation to you as you are my friend. It will be very difficult, but I must recommend that he not install those windows in his church. They are not what I promised.”
It was a long weekend. On Monday when the priest at Motohara returned we took the sixteen windows to the his church. Father Aguilar insisted I show him at least one window in the parking lot to save us the time of carrying them inside.
If only he had told me all that he had told the priest so that I could have known what to do. This was the real danger in using the go-between because most of the conversations were never translated.
At Motohara Church, after a few minutes of Japanese banter and polite exchanges between the two priests, I got the signal to open one of the boxes. We were still outside in the parking lot. I held my breath and waited. I realized that Aguilar suggested we open the boxes there in the parking lot because he sincerely believed we’d just be loading the boxes back into the car and taking them away after the priest saw them.
I unscrewed the lid, held my breath, lifted a window out of the box and stood it against the crate. The priest looked at the window and his face broke out into a big smile of relief.
“Sugoi (great)!” He said. He bowed deeply, “Domo Arigato, gaijin san!” He turned to Aguilar, bowed very deeply and began chattering enthusiastically.
“Please bring the boxes inside the church where we can take them all out so we can look at them,” he said in Japanese.
After all sixteen windows stood in a row along the wall he walked down the line, looking at the stained glass and then back at the imitation with the plastic overlay peeling off.
He beamed at the stained glass. “It is exactly what we wanted in the first place. We were afraid you might change them. As you may know Mr. Nagata died this summer. We had promised him his designs would not be changed,” he said in Japanese.
“I am surprised,” Aguilar said. “I thought surely he was expecting something completely different.”
The priest sat down in a pew and stared at the windows until time to put them back into the boxes. Even with no outside light coming through them as they stood against the wall, there was no comparison between the brilliance and color of the glass and the plastic, even though the sun was shining directly through the plastic at that time of day.
Sunteindo Garasu: Stained Glass by Kenneth Fenter Second Edition will be available on Amazon.com by Dec. 1, and at http://www.createspace.com/3869898 on Nov. 25, 2014. The Second edition is in Full Color.
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