Sawabe the Samurai: The First Convert

The most famous conversion of the whole mission: Sawabe Takuma — a Tosa samurai, fencing-master, and Shinto priest who hated foreigners and their faith, and who came to the Russian consulate at Hakodate around 1864–65 meaning to confront and perhaps kill the young hieromonk. Disarmed not by force but by a question, he stayed to listen, began secretly to copy down the missionary’s words, and was baptized Paul in the spring of 1868 as one of the first three Japanese Orthodox Christians. In 1875 the man who had come with a sword became the first native Japanese Orthodox priest.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox / Japanese (canonized 1970)

The Man Who Came to Kill

Sawabe Takuma was born in 1833 in Kochi, in the Tosa domain of Shikoku, and bore originally the name Yamamoto Kazuma (Paul Sawabe, OrthodoxWiki). He was of the samurai class and trained in the martial arts proper to it; his particular skill was the sword. In 1857 he left Tosa for the northern treaty port of Hakodate, the flight occasioned, the accounts say, by a theft incident in his home domain (OrthodoxWiki). At Hakodate he married into the family of a Shinto priest, took his wife’s surname Sawabe, and in doing so became himself a kannushi — a Shinto priest — while continuing to teach fencing. The tradition adds a detail that places him, before he ever knew it, on the very edge of the Russian mission: among his fencing pupils was, by some accounts, the son of the Russian consul, so that his swordsmanship was already connected, however distantly, to the consulate that Hieromonk Nikolai served (OrthodoxWiki).

What is essential, however, is not Sawabe’s craft but his conviction. He was a fierce anti-foreign nationalist of the type the turbulent last years of the Tokugawa order produced in such numbers — a man who revered the Emperor and held that the foreigners polluting Japan’s sacred soil ought to be driven out. Christianity he regarded as the worst of the foreign poisons: an evil sect, a tool of foreign aggression and espionage, the advance-guard of the very powers he wished expelled (Saint Nicholas of Japan, Equal-to-the-Apostles, mission2nihon, drawing on the standard Life; OrthodoxWiki). This is the man who came to the consulate.

The Encounter at the Consulate

The meeting is placed around 1864–65 — OrthodoxWiki dates it to 1865 — in the early years of Nicholas’s hidden Hakodate labors, while the saint was still deep in the immersion that Innocent had counseled (see Arrival in Japan (1861)) (OrthodoxWiki; mission2nihon). Sawabe came to Nicholas hostile, by the standard account armed with a sword, meaning to confront the missionary and, the lives say, to threaten or even to kill him. His opening words, as the Life preserves them, were a denunciation: “You barbarians come to spy on our country; especially ones like you are harmful; your faith is evil” (mission2nihon, translating the standard Life).

Nicholas did not argue. He answered with a question — and the question is the hinge of the whole story. “And do you know my faith,” he asked, “that you speak of it this way?” Sawabe was forced to admit that he did not. Nicholas pressed the admission home: “And is it reasonable to revile a thing without knowing it?” (mission2nihon; the exchange is also given, in substance, in OrthodoxWiki’s life of Paul Sawabe). The samurai had come prepared to meet an enemy and an argument; he was met instead with the bare reasonableness of a man inviting him to learn before he condemned. It was enough to make him stay.

Nicholas then began to expound the faith — and here the Life lets us hear, for once, the inner movement of a conversion. He spoke of “the One God, God the Creator of the universe, God the Redeemer,” and Sawabe, who had come to silence him, found himself transfixed. The detail that the tradition has never let go of is what his hands did while his mind was being changed: “without ceasing to listen attentively, with one hand he took out an inkwell from behind his belt, with the other — paper from his sleeve — and began to write down my speech” (mission2nihon, quoting the Life in Nicholas’s own voice). The man who entered with a sword left with a notebook.

Secret Study and Its Cost

Sawabe began to study, and he had to do it in secret, for the danger was not rhetorical. Conversion to Christianity remained a capital crime under the Tokugawa edicts, which would not be lifted until 1873 (on the ban see Arrival in Japan (1861)). The image the Life gives of his early discipleship is one of the most extraordinary in the annals of the mission: still serving as a Shinto priest, Sawabe read the Gospel during the pagan temple services themselves, setting the Christian book before him in place of the Shinto service-text and reading it under cover of his own ritual — tapping the ceremonial drum with one hand while his eyes ran over the words of Christ (mission2nihon). The drum that announced the kami was the cover under which he learned the Gospel.

The cost, when it came, was heavy, and the lives do not soften it. Sawabe was eventually arrested and imprisoned, and was saved from execution only by the political earthquake of the Meiji Restoration of 1868, which swept away the old order before the old penalties could fall on him (mission2nihon). His household was broken by his choice. His wife, on learning of his conversion, lost her reason and set their house on fire; his teenage son, left to support himself and his mother, had to take up the very Shinto priesthood his father had abandoned (mission2nihon). The first convert paid for his faith in his family and his freedom before he had even been baptized.

The First Baptisms (Spring 1868)

In the spring of 1868 — April 1868 by the fuller accounts — Nicholas at last baptized the first Japanese Orthodox Christians. The rite was performed secretly, in Nicholas’s own room at the consulate, with the reader Vissarion Sartov (Bissarion Sartoff) guarding the door against discovery (OrthodoxWiki). Three men were received: Sawabe Takuma, who took the name Pavel (Paul); Sakai Atsunori, who became Ioann (John); and Urano, who became Iakov (James) (OrthodoxWiki, which names the reader Sartov and the date April 1868; Saint Nicholas, Enlightener of Japan, OCA, which speaks of “a former samurai who was baptized with two other Japanese in the spring of 1868”; mission2nihon, for the baptismal names Paul, John, and James). These three were the first Japanese Orthodox Christians, and the nucleus of the community treated in the companion file (see The First Community).

From Sword to Priesthood (1875)

The arc of Sawabe’s life closed in a way that became, for the Japanese Church, almost a parable of the mission itself. On 12 July 1875, at the second general council of the young Church, Nicholas had Paul Sawabe ordained the first native Japanese Orthodox priest, the ordination performed by Bishop Paul of Kamchatka (OrthodoxWiki; Saint Nicholas, Enlightener of Japan, OCA, which states simply that “in 1875 the first Japanese Orthodox priest, Fr. Paul Sawabe, was ordained”). [Disputed: the ordaining hierarch is named “Bishop Paul of Kamchatka” by most accounts, while some render his title “Bishop Paul of East Siberia.”] At the same council John Sakai — the physician baptized alongside Sawabe in 1868 — was ordained deacon (OrthodoxWiki). Native clergy, that is, were drawn from the very first fruits of the mission, in keeping with everything Nicholas intended; the seed of the indigenous priesthood was planted at the start, not as an afterthought (see An Indigenous Church).

Father Paul Sawabe served his Church devotedly for decades, and died in 1913 — the year after Nicholas himself (OrthodoxWiki). The man who had come to the consulate to kill the missionary outlived him by a single year, having spent the intervening half-century as the first priest of a Church that did not exist when they met.

Significance

The conversion of Sawabe is the most famous single story of the entire mission, and it has stayed famous because it is also the mission in miniature. A foreigner’s faith, held to be an instrument of foreign power, is commended not by force or patronage but by a reasonable question put to a hostile man — and the man it converts becomes, within a decade, not a follower of the foreign priest but a priest himself, of his own people, in his own tongue. The whole enculturating program Nicholas had received from St. Innocent and would carry out for half a century — native clergy, native language, a Church that is Japanese rather than Russian-in-Japan — is prefigured in the samurai who set down his sword, took out his inkwell, and in time put on the stole.

References

Paul Sawabe. OrthodoxWiki (orthodoxwiki.org/Paul_Sawabe). (Birth 1833 in Kochi/Tosa; original name Yamamoto Kazuma; flight to Hakodate 1857; Shinto priest and fencing-master; the consul’s son among his pupils; the encounter dated 1865; baptism April 1868 with the reader Sartov guarding the door; ordination 12 July 1875 by Bishop Paul; death 1913.)
Saint Nicholas, Enlightener of Japan. Orthodox Church in America (oca.org), Lives of the Saints, February 3. (The former samurai baptized with two other Japanese in the spring of 1868; the first Japanese priest, Fr. Paul Sawabe, ordained 1875.)
Saint Nicholas of Japan, Equal-to-the-Apostles (Part 1). mission2nihon (mission2nihon.substack.com), translating and drawing on the standard Russian Life. (Sawabe’s anti-foreign nationalism; the opening denunciation and Nicholas’s questions in reply; “the One God… the Creator… the Redeemer”; the inkwell and paper; the Gospel read under cover of the temple drum; the imprisonment and the Meiji reprieve; the wife’s madness and the house-fire; the baptismal names Paul, John, and James.)