The First Community

Around the first three converts of 1868 — Paul Sawabe, John Sakai, and James Urano — there gathered at Hakodate the first Japanese Orthodox community: a tiny, hidden catechumenate that met in secret while Christianity was still a capital crime, that drew heavily from the unsettled former-samurai class, and that produced its own evangelists from the start. From this northern cradle, left in the care of Hieromonk Anatoly when Nicholas moved the mission’s center to Tokyo in 1872, the Japanese Church began to grow into the hundreds and then the thousands.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox / Japanese (canonized 1970)

The First Converts Beyond Sawabe

The conversion of Sawabe the samurai is rightly the famous story (see Sawabe the Samurai), but he was never quite alone. Sawabe brought others to Nicholas, and two in particular were baptized with him in the spring of 1868 and form, with him, the original community.

The first was Sakai Atsunori, a physician — a Confucian-trained doctor — who, like Sawabe before him, had at first dismissed Christianity as a barbaric thing before he was brought to meet Nicholas and argued out of his contempt (Saint Nicholas of Japan, Equal-to-the-Apostles, mission2nihon, which names him “Atsunori Sakai, a Confucian physician”; Saint Nicholas, Enlightener of Japan, OCA). He was baptized Ioann (John) in 1868, and would be ordained deacon in 1875 at the same council that raised Sawabe to the priesthood — the first Japanese deacon, as Sawabe was the first Japanese priest (see Sawabe the Samurai). The second was Urano, described in the lives as another physician, who was baptized Iakov (James) in 1868 (mission2nihon; OCA). [Disputed: the identity and given name of Urano are poorly attested in the surviving accounts, and the lives are not wholly consistent — some describe both Sakai and Urano as physicians, while the fuller given name “Urano Daizō” appears in some retellings but cannot be firmly established.] These three — Paul, John, and James — were the first Japanese Orthodox Christians, baptized secretly in Nicholas’s room at the consulate with a reader guarding the door.

A Church in Secret

It is essential to feel the danger under which this first community lived, for it is the measure of its courage. Christianity remained a capital crime in Japan until February 1873; the anti-Christian notice-boards still stood, and to be discovered a believer was to risk arrest, imprisonment, the ruin of one’s livelihood, and in principle death (on the ban and its lifting see Arrival in Japan (1861) and The Move to Tokyo). Sawabe’s own case — imprisoned, saved from execution only by the upheaval of the Meiji Restoration, his household destroyed — was not an aberration but the type of what conversion could cost in these years (mission2nihon). The first converts and catechumens therefore met in secret through the late 1860s and into the early 1870s, instructed quietly, baptized behind guarded doors. That a community formed at all under such conditions, rather than a scatter of frightened individuals, is the first remarkable fact about Japanese Orthodoxy.

And form it did. Despite the secrecy, the nucleus grew. The OCA Life records that after the baptism of the samurai and his two companions Nicholas “soon had a group of fifteen Christians” at Hakodate — no longer three isolated converts but a small, real catechumenate, the seed of a local Church (OCA). By the time Nicholas was able to report openly on his work, the Hakodate community had become something with shape and continuity.

Converts Who Became Missionaries

The most consequential feature of this first community is what its members did almost as soon as they were received: they began to preach to their own countrymen. Sawabe and Sakai did not wait to be told. The former samurai and the former Confucian physician immediately set about evangelizing other Japanese, carrying to their compatriots, in their own language and out of their own experience, the faith they had themselves resisted and then embraced (mission2nihon; OCA).

This was the germ of the whole later method of the mission. Nicholas grasped quickly what he had been given: that the most effective missionaries to the Japanese were not the foreign priest but the Japanese converts themselves, and that a Church planted this way could grow far faster, and far more deeply, than one dependent on a handful of foreigners. The pattern by which a convert was instructed, baptized, and then sent to instruct others — the indigenous catechist system that would carry the faith across the islands — is visible in embryo in the very first community at Hakodate, in the figures of Sawabe and Sakai turning at once from learners into teachers (see The Catechist System).

The Social Character of the First Believers

A noted feature of early Japanese Orthodoxy, visible already in this Hakodate nucleus, is the prominence of the former samurai class — the shizoku — among its converts. Sawabe was a samurai; the early lives stress the samurai and educated background of many of the first believers (Paul Sawabe, OrthodoxWiki; mission2nihon). Scholars of the mission have generally read this against the dislocation of the Meiji Restoration, which abolished the old feudal order and left a whole class of warrior-administrators dispossessed, unsettled, and searching for meaning in a world that had pulled the ground from under them. To such men — disciplined, literate, accustomed to a code, and now without one — a faith that offered a serious moral and metaphysical order could speak with peculiar force. The point should be framed as the general observation it is, not pressed into a single cause; but the samurai stamp on the first generation of Japanese Orthodox is real, and it gave the young Church a backbone of educated, courageous converts of exactly the kind a hidden and persecuted body most needed.

Hakodate as the Cradle

The community at Hakodate was the first Japanese Orthodox community, and for its first decade it was the mission. It was here, in the consular town on Hokkaido, that the faith first took root in Japanese soil, here that the first baptisms, the first catechumenate, and the first native evangelists appeared.

That centrality shifted, but the cradle was not abandoned. When Nicholas moved the center of the mission to Tokyo in 1872 — following the believers and the opportunity into the new capital (see The Move to Tokyo) — he did not leave the northern flock untended. He placed Hakodate and its growing community in the care of Hieromonk Anatoly (Anatolii Tikhai), the able assistant who would shepherd the north while Nicholas built the mission’s new heart in Tokyo (Saint Nicholas of Japan, Equal-to-the-Apostles, mission2nihon, Part 8). The first community thus continued under its own pastor even as the mission’s weight moved south.

The Beginning of Growth

From this point the numbers begin to climb, slowly at first and then steadily. The mission, concentrated in the north — at Hakodate and in the Sendai region — before spreading southward, grew through the early 1870s from the original handful into the hundreds. By the mid-1870s the converts numbered in the hundreds, and the Church was on the way to its first thousand. Encyclopædia Britannica puts the count at roughly 400 Japanese Orthodox by 1874 (Saint Nikolay Kasatkin, Britannica). [Disputed: precise figures for the early 1870s vary between accounts; Britannica’s “about 400 by 1874” is the best-attested round figure, but other lives give only general language of “hundreds, then over a thousand” without firm dates.] What had begun in 1868 as three men baptized behind a guarded door at the consulate had become, within a few years of the legalization of Christianity in 1873, a genuine and growing local Church — the first fruits of a body that would, in Nicholas’s lifetime, count tens of thousands.

The story of how that small northern community became a national Church — through the move to Tokyo, the catechist system, the great work of translation, and the building of the cathedral — is the subject of the files that follow.

See Also

• Sawabe the Samurai — the first convert, with whom Sakai and Urano were baptized in 1868
• Arrival in Japan (1861) — the hidden years and the legal ban under which this first community lived
• The Move to Tokyo — the 1872 shift of the mission’s center, and Hakodate left to Hieromonk Anatoly
• The Catechist System — the indigenous evangelism prefigured in Sawabe and Sakai
• An Indigenous Church — the Japanese Church that grew from this Hakodate seed
• Orthodoxy Guide: World Orthodoxy — the communion of local Churches into which this community was being gathered

References

• Saint Nicholas, Enlightener of Japan. Orthodox Church in America (oca.org), Lives of the Saints, February 3. (Sakai and Urano baptized with Sawabe in spring 1868; “soon had a group of fifteen Christians”; the converts’ own evangelism.)
• Saint Nicholas of Japan, Equal-to-the-Apostles (Parts 1 and 8). mission2nihon (mission2nihon.substack.com), drawing on the standard Russian Life. (Atsunori Sakai, a Confucian physician; Urano, another physician; the baptismal names John and James; the secret meetings and the cost of conversion; the first converts as evangelists; Hieromonk Anatoly Tikhai given charge of Hakodate after the 1872 move to Tokyo.)
• Paul Sawabe. OrthodoxWiki (orthodoxwiki.org/Paul_Sawabe). (The samurai background of Sawabe and the first believers; Sakai’s 1875 ordination as deacon.)
• Saint Nikolay Kasatkin. Encyclopædia Britannica (britannica.com/biography/Saint-Nikolay-Kasatkin). (Approximately 400 Japanese Orthodox by 1874.)