Arrival in Japan (1861)

The long road to Hakodate: the overland crossing of Siberia in 1860–61; the winter spent at Nikolaevsk-on-Amur, where the young hieromonk met St. Innocent (Veniaminov), the apostle to Alaska and Siberia, who advised him to master the language and to translate, and who clothed him for the work; the arrival at the Russian consulate in Hakodate in the early summer of 1861; and the first hidden years of study in a country where his faith was still a capital crime.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox / Japanese (canonized 1970)

The Crossing of Siberia

Hieromonk Nikolai left St. Petersburg in the summer of 1860 and made for Japan the only way then open — overland, eastward across the whole breadth of the Russian Empire (Enlightener of Japan: Blessed Nicholas Kasatkin, ROCA / Orthodox America; Saint Nicholas of Japan, Equal-to-the-Apostles, mission2nihon). The journey ran for thousands of miles by carriage, sledge, and river, over the Urals and across Siberia, and it could not be completed in a single season. He carried with him a blessing-icon of the Smolensk Mother of God, the protectress of his native province (mission2nihon). When winter closed the route he was forced to halt, and he wintered at Nikolaevsk-on-Amur, the Pacific-coast town near the river’s mouth, for roughly half a year (mission2nihon, which has him studying Japanese and Chinese through the stranded months).

St. Innocent at Nikolaevsk

It was at Nikolaevsk that the journey acquired its decisive encounter. There the young monk met St. Innocent (Ivan Veniaminov), then Bishop (soon Archbishop) of Kamchatka, the Kurils, and the Aleutians — the veteran missionary of Alaska and the Russian Far East, the future Metropolitan of Moscow, and the man who, more than any other, had already worked out in practice what an Orthodox mission of enculturation looked like (OrthoChristian; ACROD; ROCA; mission2nihon). The meeting is one of the best-attested episodes of Nicholas’s early life, and the counsel Innocent gave shaped everything that followed.

Innocent told the inexperienced hieromonk what his own decades in Alaska had taught him: that the missionary’s first task was to master the language of the people thoroughly, and then to translate the Holy Scriptures and the services into it — and not to be cast down by the slowness and disappointment of the work (OrthoChristian; ACROD; ROCA). This was the program Innocent had carried out among the Aleuts and the Tlingit, and it became, almost verbatim, the program of the Japanese mission.

The weight of that counsel lay in the fact that Innocent was not offering theory but reporting a method already proven on the ground. In his years among the Aleut of Unalaska and the islands he had devised an alphabet for the Aleut language and reduced it to writing, translated the Gospel of St. Matthew, the catechism, and portions of the services into Aleut, composed in that tongue his own catechetical work on the way into the Kingdom, and — crucially — laboured to raise up native clergy so that the Church among the Aleut would not remain a thing run by Russians but would belong to the people themselves. He had carried the same approach to the Tlingit of Sitka and across the vast Siberian diocese that later fell to him. Taken together, this was a worked-out model of Orthodox enculturation: the conviction that a people is converted not by being made Russian but by receiving the faith in its own language, its own script, and at last its own pastors. When Innocent set this before the young hieromonk at Nikolaevsk, he was handing on the template that he himself had built, and Nicholas would spend the next half-century replicating it in Japan — the alphabet’s place taken by the choice of a Japanese literary register, the Aleut Matthew by the Japanese Scriptures and services, the Aleut clergy by the Japanese priests and catechists he would form. The two missions are thus stages of a single continuous Pacific enterprise of the Russian Church, reaching from the Aleutians and Alaska across to the Japanese islands, and the elder’s hand passing the work to the younger (the kinship is treated in St. Herman of Alaska). Two gifts attached themselves to the counsel in the tradition. Innocent is said to have had a cassock made for Nicholas from good velvet, telling him that he should appear before the Japanese with dignity rather than in shabbiness (mission2nihon; ROCA). And he gave him his own pectoral cross — the bronze cross he had received for his service during the Crimean War (mission2nihon; ACROD; ROCA). The apostle to America thus, in a real sense, commissioned the apostle to Japan; the kinship between the two missions is treated in St. Herman of Alaska and is the Pacific backdrop to the whole of this collection.

Arrival at Hakodate

When the season opened, Nicholas completed the passage by sea to the treaty port of Hakodate on the southern coast of Hokkaido, the northernmost of the Japanese islands then open to foreigners under the 1855 Russo-Japanese Treaty of Shimoda. He arrived in the early summer of 1861 (OCA; Wikipedia; obitel-minsk; mission2nihon; ROCA). [Disputed: the exact day is genuinely uncertain. The two figures in circulation — 14 June 1861 (obitel-minsk, mission2nihon, ROCA, the last naming the naval transport Amur) and 2 July 1861 (Wikipedia, OCA) — are eighteen days apart, which exceeds the twelve-day Julian–Gregorian gap of the period; they therefore cannot be a clean Old Style / New Style pair of the same event, and at least one carries an error. “June or early July 1861” is the only statement the sources jointly support.] He was twenty-four.

The Russia he represented in Hakodate was a small one: the consulate under Goshkevich, a clutch of officials and traders, and the modest consular Church of the Resurrection — a wooden chapel attached to the consulate, the ancestor of today’s Holy Resurrection Church of Hakodate, the oldest Orthodox church in Japan (Old Russian Consulate in Hakodate, Wikipedia; Embassy of the Russian Federation, Hakodate). This Hakodate Resurrection church is not to be confused with the later Tokyo cathedral that would bear the same dedication (see Nikolai-do).

Hakodate in 1861 was one of the handful of points where the long-sealed empire had been pried open. The treaties of the 1850s — the American Convention of Kanagawa of 1854 and the commercial treaties of 1858, and on the Russian side the Treaty of Shimoda of 1855 — had ended more than two centuries of sakoku, the policy of national seclusion, by designating a small number of treaty ports in which foreigners might reside and trade under their own consuls and their own law. Hakodate was among the first of these. The result was a peculiar enclave world: a tiny foreign community of consuls, merchants, sailors, and the occasional traveller, clustered at the edge of the harbour and hedged about by treaty restrictions, set down on the southern tip of Hokkaido — then the northern frontier of Japan, a thinly settled island of fishing stations and the indigenous Ainu, only beginning to be colonised in earnest from the Japanese heartland. It was a raw, remote posting at the empire’s margin. And within that enclave the consular church was the only legal Orthodox presence in the whole of Japan: tolerated strictly as the private worship of resident foreigners, not as a mission to the Japanese, who remained forbidden by their own law to come near it as believers. Nicholas’s official standing, in other words, was simply that of chaplain to a few Russians; everything that mattered most about his errand had no legal existence at all.

A Country Still Closed

Around that little Russian island lay a country in which his actual work was forbidden. Christianity remained banned under the Tokugawa edicts — the national prohibition that dated to 1614 and had been enforced with extreme severity since the Shimabara Rebellion of the 1630s. For a Japanese to accept Christianity was a capital matter; the public notice-boards proscribing the “evil sect” still stood, and would not come down until February 1873 (mission2nihon; Five Public Notices, Wikipedia; on the lifting of the ban see The Move to Tokyo). Open evangelism was simply impossible.

So Nicholas did exactly what Innocent had told him to do. He spent his first years — the lives commonly say seven or eight, working as much as fourteen hours a day — not in preaching but in immersion: learning Japanese until he had command of several thousand characters, and steeping himself in Japanese history and in the three great traditions of the country, Buddhism, Confucianism, and Shinto, visiting temples, schools, and even fencing halls (OrthoChristian, which gives the “fourteen hours a day over the course of seven years”; obitel-minsk). He approached the religions of Japan not as an enemy to be refuted but as a world to be understood, and this patient, sympathetic immersion is the root of everything distinctive in his mission (see Asceticism and Method).

The labour of those first years is easy to state and hard to imagine. Japanese is, for a European, one of the most formidable of all languages to acquire — a tongue unrelated to anything Nicholas knew, written in a script that fuses thousands of borrowed Chinese characters with two native syllabaries, layered with distinct registers for speech and for the learned page, and in his day almost wholly without the grammars, dictionaries, and teaching materials that a modern student takes for granted. He could not learn it from books that did not exist; he had to learn it from people, by total immersion. So he sought out teachers and conversation wherever the living language was to be found — in the temples, in the schools, even in the fencing halls — and ground his way into the tongue character by character until he had command of several thousand of them, working, the lives say, as much as fourteen hours a day (OrthoChristian; obitel-minsk). With the language he took in the country’s mind: its history, and above all its three great traditions of Buddhism, Confucianism, and Shinto, which he studied not as an enemy assembling ammunition but sympathetically, to understand them from within. He read the Buddhist texts, sat in on the teaching, and weighed the moral seriousness of the Confucian inheritance and the native piety of Shinto on their own terms before he ever presumed to set the Gospel beside them. This sympathetic study is the root of everything distinctive in his mission (see Asceticism and Method).

What this demanded above all was patience — the willingness to labour for years before a single soul was brought to Christ. Innocent had warned him precisely of this: that the work would be slow and disappointing, and that he must not be cast down by it. For seven or eight years Nicholas preached to no one. He prepared, and waited, and trusted that the long discipline of delayed fruit was itself part of the work rather than a delay before it. That patience was vindicated when his immersion bore its first, startling fruit out of one of those very fencing halls — in the person of a Shinto priest and swordsman who came to the consulate meaning to kill him (see Sawabe the Samurai).

References

Saint Nicholas, Enlightener of Japan. Orthodox Church in America (oca.org), February 3. (Arrival; the first converts; the meeting with Innocent is implied in the standard Life.)
Nicholas of Japan. Wikipedia. (Arrival “2 July 1861”; the Treaty of Shimoda context; used to locate sources.)
St. Nicholas of Japan, Apostle to Japan (Monk Nicodemus Jones). OrthoChristian.com (orthochristian.com/51599.html). (Innocent’s counsel to learn the language and translate; the fourteen-hour days over seven years.)
Saint Nicholas of Japan, Equal-to-the-Apostles (Part 1). mission2nihon (mission2nihon.substack.com). (The Siberian crossing; the Smolensk icon; the Nikolaevsk winter; the velvet cassock; arrival 14 June 1861.)
Enlightener of Japan: Blessed Nicholas Kasatkin (Presbytera Doreen Bartholomew). Orthodox America / ROCA (roca.org). (The journey; the transport Amur; Innocent’s cross.)
The Apostle to Japan (Fr. Edward Pehanich). ACROD (acrod.org). (Innocent’s advice and the pectoral cross.)
The Life of Equal-to-the-Apostles Nicholai, Archbishop of Japan. Saint Elisabeth Convent (obitel-minsk.org). (Arrival 14 June 1861; the eight years of fourteen-hour study.)
Old Russian Consulate in Hakodate; Five Public Notices. Wikipedia (consular Resurrection church; the anti-Christian notice-boards and their 1873 removal).
Embassy of the Russian Federation, Hakodate (tokyo.mid.ru). (The consulate and its Resurrection chapel.)