Language and Culture

The decision behind the translations: St. Nicholas and Pavel Nakai deliberately chose a high, classical Japanese literary register — bungo, dense with Sino-Japanese kanbun vocabulary and abundant kanji — rather than the colloquial spoken tongue, making a sacral idiom set apart for the holy. The choice flowed from years of immersion in Japanese language, history, and religion, and from the conviction that the faith must be Japanese, in Japanese; it stands in the indigenizing lineage of St. Innocent and the Alaskan and Siberian missions.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox / Japanese (canonized 1970)

A Deliberately Classical Register

The most consequential choice in the whole translation program was not which texts to render but into what kind of Japanese. Nicholas and Nakai deliberately chose a high, classical literary register — bungo, classical literary Japanese — with heavy use of Sino-Japanese (kanbun) vocabulary and abundant kanji, rather than the colloquial spoken language of ordinary Meiji life (Nicholas of Japan, Wikipedia, which notes the “full use of abundant Kanji” and that the 1880–1889 revision aimed at greater accuracy with abundant kanji). The result is a deliberately elevated, archaic, sacral idiom — a Japanese marked off from everyday speech. Indeed the Japanese Orthodox biblical and liturgical texts are today read as archaic or classical, precisely the effect the translators intended (Nicholas of Japan, Wikipedia, “the Japanese texts are today read archaically”).

This was not the line of least resistance. A colloquial rendering would have been easier to produce and easier for the unlettered to follow. Nicholas and Nakai chose the harder and higher path on purpose, and the reasons go to the heart of what they thought a sacred text should be.

Why the High Tongue

The choice mirrored the register that sacred and learned texts already occupied in the Japanese tradition. The Buddhist sutras, the Confucian classics, the whole world of kanbun learning — these were written and recited in a language consciously set apart from the marketplace, a tongue whose very difficulty and antiquity signalled that what it carried was holy and weighty. To clothe the Christian Scriptures and services in colloquial Japanese would have been, in that cultural setting, to make them sound thin, ephemeral, unserious — the idiom of the newspaper rather than of the eternal. To clothe them in classical bungo and dense kanji was to give them the gravity that a Japanese reader’s whole formation taught him to expect of the sacred.

It is worth being more precise about what these registers were, for their prestige is the whole point. Bungo — literally the “literary language” — was the classical written Japanese that had served as the language of serious writing for roughly a thousand years, its grammar and vocabulary fixed by the literature of the Heian court and held deliberately apart from the kōgo, the colloquial spoken tongue, which it scarcely resembled. To write in bungo was to write in the register of permanence. Kanbun, more elevated still, was the Japanese mode of reading and composing in literary Chinese — the medium in which the Confucian canon, the Buddhist scriptures, the law codes, the chronicles, and the whole inheritance of high learning had come into Japan and been transmitted within it. For more than a millennium kanbun and the dense Sino-Japanese vocabulary that came with it had been the unquestioned vehicle of sacred and scholarly authority. The Buddhist sutras were chanted in Sino-Japanese readings of Chinese characters; the Confucian Four Books and Five Classics, the bedrock of the educated man’s formation, were kanbun through and through. A Japanese reader did not merely understand that such texts were weighty; the very shape of the language on the page, archaic and Chinese-laden and difficult, told him so before he had construed a sentence. An elevated register, in this culture, was not ornament but signal: it marked off the holy and the lasting from the ephemeral chatter of the everyday.

Nakai’s kanbun scholarship was exactly suited to this task. A man steeped in the Chinese classics could find, for a Slavonic or Greek phrase, the Japanese register that would land on a Japanese ear as scripture lands rather than as journalism. The aim throughout was dignity, permanence, and a genuinely Japanese sacral language — not easy accessibility. This is best understood as a considered theological and cultural decision: the making of a holy tongue for the Japanese Church.

By way of observation rather than from any single source, the logic here is the same “hieratic” logic that governs Church Slavonic for the Russians or the King James register for English-speakers: a language held a little apart from the speech of every day, archaic and dignified, felt to be fitting for the worship of God in a way that the vernacular of the street is not. The instinct recurs with remarkable persistence across the sacred languages of the world. For the Slavs it produced Church Slavonic, never an everyday tongue but a liturgical idiom shaped from the start for worship and held steady while the spoken Slavic languages drifted away from it over the centuries. For the Greek-speaking world the Septuagint and the Byzantine liturgical Greek of the services kept an archaic dignity distinct from the demotic of the streets. For English the Authorized (King James) Version and the Book of Common Prayer register — already somewhat archaic when they were fixed, and only more so as the language moved on — became for whole generations the very sound of scripture and prayer. The same instinct stands behind the Latin of the Western Church and, in their own ways, behind the liturgical Hebrew of the synagogue and the Qur’anic Arabic of the mosque. Across these otherwise unconnected traditions one sees the recurring impulse to mark sacred speech off from common speech, to reserve for the worship of God a tongue raised a little above the marketplace. Offered here as observation rather than as a sourced claim, the pattern frames what Nicholas and Nakai were doing: they were not inventing an oddity but supplying, for Japanese, the equivalent of an instinct the Church had followed wherever it had gone. Nicholas, a Russian who prayed in Slavonic, would have understood it from the inside; what he and Nakai did was give it its Japanese form.

Translation as Enculturation

The register was not an isolated aesthetic preference; it was the natural expression of a much deeper method. Nicholas had spent his first seven or eight years in Japan not preaching but studying — learning the language until he commanded several thousand characters, and immersing himself in Japanese history and in the three great traditions of the country, Buddhism, Confucianism, and Shinto (see Arrival in Japan (1861) and Asceticism and Method). He approached the religions of Japan sympathetically — to understand them rather than merely to refute them — visiting temples and schools, reading their texts, taking the culture seriously on its own terms.

The translation flowed from that immersion. A man who had read the sutras and the Confucian classics, and who had chosen a kanbun scholar as his lifelong partner, was not importing a foreign book into Japan; he was finding the Japanese words in which the Christian mystery could be at home.

Underneath the practical labour lies a theological principle, and it is worth naming. The deepest warrant for enculturation in the Orthodox understanding is incarnational: the Word of God did not remain abstract and universal but became flesh in a particular time, place, body, and tongue. A faith founded on the Word made flesh cannot consistently treat any human language or culture as beneath it or foreign to it; the logic of the Incarnation is that the Gospel is meant to take flesh again in each people, to be spoken in its words and to dwell in its forms, rather than to hover over it as an alien possession. To render the Scriptures and the services into a people’s own sacred register is therefore not a mere convenience of communication but an enactment of the mystery the texts proclaim. This is why translation stands so near the centre of Orthodox mission rather than at its periphery.

The clearest precedent, and the one that most directly underwrites what Nicholas did, is the ninth-century mission of Saints Cyril and Methodius to the Slavs. The two brothers from Thessalonica, sent to Great Moravia, judged that the Slavs must have the Scriptures and the Liturgy in their own language; to that end Cyril devised an alphabet for a tongue that had never been written and, with Methodius, translated the Gospels and the services into what became Church Slavonic — over the resistance of those who held that God might be worshipped only in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin. Their vindication settled, for the Eastern Church, that the vernacular principle is right: that every people may pray and read the Word in a tongue shaped from its own. It is precisely in this line that Nicholas stands. What Cyril and Methodius did for the Slavs, and what Innocent had lately done for the Aleut, Nicholas set out to do for the Japanese — to give a people, in its own sacred speech, the Scriptures and the Liturgy of the Church. (The Slavonic mission is general Church history; its bearing on the Japanese case is the collection’s own framing; on the goal of a Church standing on its own feet see An Indigenous Church.)

This is the through-line of Nicholas’s entire mission and of this whole collection: he insisted that the faith be Japanese, in Japanese — not a Russian import wearing Japanese dress. The translated texts were the instrument by which that conviction became concrete, the means by which a Japanese could pray as a Japanese and yet as an Orthodox Christian. The same conviction governs his refusal to let the Church be a Russian outpost during the Russo-Japanese War (see Staying with His Flock) and his lifelong work to build a Church that could stand on Japanese feet (see An Indigenous Church).

The Inheritance

Nicholas did not invent this method; he inherited it. The principle of vernacular translation — of giving each people the Scriptures and the services in its own tongue — came to him from St. Innocent (Veniaminov), who had set him the program at Nikolaevsk, and behind Innocent stood the broader Orthodox indigenizing tradition: the Alaskan and Siberian missions, and the Kazan school with its Ilminsky method of vernacular-Scripture translation for the peoples of the Russian East. Stamoolis situates Nicholas squarely in this lineage, as one instance of a settled Orthodox missiological tradition rather than a lone improviser (Stamoolis, Eastern Orthodox Mission Theology Today, pp. 35–40). The Alaskan precedent — Innocent’s own translations among the Aleuts, and the broader Pacific mission of which St. Herman was the elder — is the nearest kin of the Japanese work (see St. Herman of Alaska). What Innocent had done for the Aleut, Nicholas did for the Japanese; the unbroken thread is the conviction that a Church must speak the language of the land it is in.

A word of distinction is in order. The Protestant and Catholic Japanese Bible translations of the era used different registers — often more colloquial, or classical in different ways — so that the Orthodox texts stand apart in their particular choice of a high, kanbun-laden idiom. The point is not that the Orthodox register was the only respectable one, but that it was distinctive, and distinctively the fruit of Nicholas and Nakai’s joint judgement about what a Japanese sacred language should be.

The Living Legacy

The texts shaped the worship and the self-understanding of the Japanese Church, and they remain a monument both of Meiji-era translation and of Orthodox mission — one of the genuine achievements of nineteenth-century Japan’s encounter with the wider world, and one of the enduring fruits of the Orthodox missionary tradition.

It is in the worship above all that the translations did their forming work. Orthodox services are largely sung — the psalmody, the hymns of the daily and festal cycles, the responses of the Liturgy — so that the translated words were not merely read in private but chanted in common, week by week and feast by feast, by congregations gathered in their own tongue (on the shape of the rite see Orthodoxy Guide: The Divine Liturgy). A people that sings its faith in a sacred register of its own language comes, over time, to carry that faith differently than a people that hears it read in a foreign one. The high, dignified Japanese of the services gave Japanese Orthodox Christians a worship that was unmistakably their own and unmistakably set apart, and it is no small part of why the Church Nicholas planted struck root as a genuinely Japanese community rather than a Russian chaplaincy with Japanese members (see The Life of the Communities). The translated corpus became the common possession in which a scattered and often poor body of believers recognised itself. They are also, by their very nature, archaic for a modern Japanese reader. The same classical register that gave the texts their dignity and permanence now sets them at a certain remove from contemporary speech — which raises a living question for the Church today, the perennial question of every hieratic language: how to hold together reverence and intelligibility, the dignity of the holy tongue and the comprehension of the worshipper (framed lightly here; see Canonization and the Church Today). It is a sign of the texts’ success, not their failure, that the question arises: they have lasted long enough to become venerable, which is exactly what their makers intended.

References

Nicholas of Japan. Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_of_Japan). (The classical register and “full use of abundant Kanji”; the 1880–1889 revision aiming at accuracy with abundant kanji; the texts “today read archaically.”)
Stamoolis, James J. Eastern Orthodox Mission Theology Today, pp. 35–40. (Nicholas within the Orthodox indigenizing tradition; St. Innocent, the Alaskan/Siberian missions, and the Kazan/Ilminsky vernacular method.)
St. Nicholas of Japan, Apostle to Japan (Monk Nicodemus Jones). OrthoChristian.com (orthochristian.com/51599.html). (The years of immersion in Japanese language and the three traditions; the sympathetic study of Japanese religion.)
Saint Nicholas of Japan, Equal-to-the-Apostles. mission2nihon (mission2nihon.substack.com). (Nakai’s kanbun scholarship; the enculturating method and the insistence on a Japanese Church in Japanese.)