The Japanese Scriptures and Liturgy

The central labor of his life: the forty-year program of translation by which St. Nicholas gave the Japanese Church its Scriptures and its services — the counsel St. Innocent had set him in 1861, carried out every evening for thirty years with the Confucian scholar Pavel Nakai Tsugumaro, from the Church Slavonic and the Greek into an elevated literary Japanese. The official Japanese New Testament was completed in 1901; the liturgical corpus — Triodion, Pentecostarion, Menaion, Octoechos, Horologion, and the festal services — remains in use in the Orthodox Church of Japan to this day.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox / Japanese (canonized 1970)

“Translation Is the Core of Missionary Work”

The program had been set for Nicholas at the very start. When the young hieromonk wintered at Nikolaevsk-on-Amur in 1860–61, St. Innocent (Veniaminov) told him that the missionary’s first task was to master the language of the people and then to translate the Scriptures and the services into it — the method Innocent had carried out among the Aleuts and the Tlingit (see Arrival in Japan (1861)). Nicholas took the counsel literally and made it the governing principle of his work. “Translation is the core of missionary work,” he is recorded as saying — a maxim that compresses his whole approach to mission into a sentence (St. Nicholas of Japan, Apostle to Japan, Monk Nicodemus Jones, OrthoChristian.com, orthochristian.com/51599.html).

This was not a pious figure of speech. For Nicholas the translation of the sacred texts was not preparatory to the mission, nor a scholarly sideline to be delegated; it was the mission, the labor to which he gave the largest and best part of his time and strength across four decades. The Church he intended to plant was to worship and read in its own tongue from the beginning, and that could happen only if the texts existed. Everything else — the catechist system, the cathedral, the seminary — presupposed a body of Japanese Scriptures and services that did not yet exist when he arrived, and which it fell to him to make.

The Collaborator: Pavel Nakai Tsugumaro

A translation of this kind could not be the work of a foreigner alone, however good his Japanese, and Nicholas knew it. The decisive figure on the Japanese side was Nakai Tsugumaro (baptized Pavel / Paul), a Japanese Confucian and Chinese-classics scholar — a master of kanbun, the classical Sino-Japanese learned idiom — who had run a kanbun private academy in Osaka before he was called to Tokyo in 1882 to work with Nicholas (Nicholas of Japan, Wikipedia; mission2nihon). [Disputed: his given name is transliterated Tsugumaro / Tsugimaro / Tsugumarō across sources; the underlying name is the same man.] From that year until Nicholas’s death in 1912 — roughly thirty years — Nakai was his lifelong translation partner, and the Japanese Scriptures and services bear the imprint of his learning as much as of Nicholas’s.

The collaboration mattered precisely because the two men brought complementary mastery. Nicholas commanded the source — the Church Slavonic and the Greek, the dogmatic content, the exact theological meaning of each phrase. Nakai commanded the target — the resources of high classical Japanese and the kanbun vocabulary in which a sacred text would have to be clothed if it were to read as sacred to Japanese ears. Neither could have produced the result alone, and the texts are properly the fruit of both.

Something of the depth of Nakai’s learning can be filled in from the accounts. He stood in the tradition of the great merchant-city Confucian academies of the late Tokugawa period; the sources connect his formation to the Kaitokudō, the celebrated Confucian academy of Osaka, the school of the city’s scholar-merchants and one of the most respected centers of Chinese-classical learning outside the official institutions of the shogunate (mission2nihon; Wikipedia). A man so trained had at his command the whole apparatus of kanbun — the Confucian canon, the histories, the high literary diction in which serious thought was written in East Asia — and it was exactly this apparatus that a sacred Japanese text required. Before his call to Tokyo Nakai had himself run a private kanbun academy in Osaka, teaching the classical idiom to his own pupils; he was, in other words, not a convert pressed into service as a copyist but an established master of the very register in which the Scriptures and services would have to be cast. His call to Tokyo in 1882 brought that mastery to Nicholas’s side, and the partnership that began in that year ran for some thirty years, until Nicholas’s death in 1912 — among the longest and most consequential scholarly collaborations in the history of the Orthodox mission.

The Method

The division of labor followed from this. Nicholas established the meaning of the source text and held the rendering accountable to it; Nakai supplied and polished the elevated literary Japanese (Nicholas of Japan, Wikipedia). A surviving description of the two men at work catches the discipline of it: “Nakai read a Japanese translation and the archbishop followed his reading, looking into another notebook” — Nakai voicing the Japanese draft aloud, Nicholas tracking it against the original, sentence by sentence, correcting where the Japanese drifted from the sense (Nicholas of Japan, Wikipedia).

They worked principally from the Church Slavonic, with reference to the Greek, and the standard accounts add that they consulted existing Chinese versions of the Scriptures as well — a natural recourse, given that the Chinese texts were written in characters legible to a kanbun scholar and stood in something like the relation to literary Japanese that the Slavonic stood in to the spoken Russian. (The detail that Chinese and Greek were consulted alongside the Slavonic is the standard account and rests partly on secondary report; it should be stated as such rather than over-claimed.)

The governing aim was fidelity of meaning rather than word-for-word literalism. The work sought “semantic rather than literal translations, adapting the text to Japanese reality” — a rendering that carried the sense and the dignity of the original into a genuinely Japanese register, rather than a calque that reproduced the surface of the Slavonic at the cost of intelligibility (Puzanova, The Orthodox Mission in Japan, Oxford DPhil thesis, 2020, ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:27bf3331-8744-4e53-b614-98ebf80b9532). The specific choice of register that resulted — a deliberately high, archaic, sacral Japanese — is treated in the companion file Language and Culture.

The Discipline of Thirty Years

What turned method into achievement was sheer persistence. For thirty years Nicholas gave to the translation every evening from 6:00 to 10:00 p.m. — four hours nightly — working, by his own practice, one verse at a time (The Apostle to Japan, Fr. Edward Pehanich, ACROD, acrod.org: “For thirty years he spent every evening from 6:00 till 10:00 on this project”). The arithmetic is its own commentary: four hours a night for three decades is the kind of total that does not survive a single year of slackening, and Nicholas did not slacken. The translation was, in the most exact sense, the daily ascesis of his life — the discipline through which he served at an altar whose language he was still, verse by verse, building. On that ascetic shape, and on the diaries that record it, see Asceticism and Method.

The Scope of the Work

The fruit of those evenings was a corpus, not a single book. The official Japanese New Testament text was completed in 1901 (Nicholas of Japan, Wikipedia; orthodox-jp.com summary of the translation periods). Beyond the New Testament, Nicholas also translated the Psalms and parts of the Old Testament, including Genesis and Isaiah — though the whole Old Testament was never completed, a labor that lay beyond even thirty years of evenings.

That official text of 1901 was the end of a long road, and the chronology repays a moment’s attention, for it shows the work as a process of continual revision rather than a single act. Nicholas had begun rendering the Gospels relatively early, in the first phase of the mission, so that some Scripture existed in Japanese well before the complete New Testament; but the early versions did not satisfy him. The standard accounts describe a sustained labor of revision running through the 1880s, after Nakai’s arrival, in which the texts were reworked toward greater accuracy and toward a fuller and more deliberate use of kanji — the Chinese characters that carried the weight and dignity of the learned register, and on which a kanbun scholar like Nakai could draw with authority (Wikipedia; orthodox-jp.com; the standard accounts). The movement over the decades was thus toward a text both more faithful to the original and more fully clothed in the sacral, character-rich Japanese that Nicholas and Nakai judged worthy of Scripture. The complete New Testament of 1901 represents not a first draft but the settled fruit of that long process of correction; the Psalter and the several liturgical books were carried forward on the same principle, revised and re-revised across the years until they reached the form in which they were printed and used.

The liturgical corpus was the larger achievement, for it was the worship of the Church that depended on it most directly. Over the decades Nicholas and Nakai produced Japanese texts of:

the Lenten Triodion and the Pentecostarion (the Festal or “Colored” Triodion);
the Festal Menaion (the services of the fixed feasts);
the Parimejnik (the Prophetologion, the Old-Testament lectionary read at Vespers);
the Psalter;
an Abridged Octoechos (printed around 1894–95);
the Irmologion, the Book of Hours (Horologion), and the festal services generally.

(Nicholas of Japan, Wikipedia; orthodox-jp.com summary of the translation periods.) Taken together this is the working library of Orthodox worship — the books a parish actually needs to keep the round of services — rendered into Japanese for the first time. These translations remain in liturgical use in the Orthodox Church of Japan today; the Japanese faithful pray, more than a century on, in the texts Nicholas and Nakai shaped verse by verse. For the services themselves and their place in Orthodox worship, see Orthodoxy Guide: The Divine Liturgy.

The Inheritance and the Tradition

It bears repeating that none of this was Nicholas’s invention. The whole program — master the language, then translate the Scriptures and the services into it, and let the people worship in their own tongue from the first — was the translation-first method he had received from St. Innocent (Veniaminov) at Nikolaevsk in 1860–61 (see Arrival in Japan (1861)). St. Innocent had carried out exactly this work among the peoples of the Russian Far East and Alaska, translating Scripture and services into Aleut and other native tongues and building churches that prayed in the vernacular; the Alaskan mission, of which St. Herman of Alaska was the most beloved figure, stands as the immediate precedent and the proving-ground of the method (on that earlier mission see St. Herman of Alaska). Nicholas in Japan was, in this sense, doing in a new and far more literate field what the Russian mission had already done in the north: applying a settled Orthodox conviction that the Church must speak to each people in its own language.

That conviction is older and wider than either man. The Orthodox tradition has, from the mission of Saints Cyril and Methodius to the Slavs onward, characteristically held that the Scriptures and the Liturgy belong in the vernacular of the converted people — that the Church does not impose a sacred foreign tongue but gives each nation the Gospel in its own. Nicholas’s forty years over the Slavonic and the Japanese are a single, particularly disciplined instance of that long Orthodox vernacular-mission tradition, and his achievement is best measured against it: not a freakish feat of one scholar’s industry, but the fullest Meiji-era expression of a method the Orthodox Church had practiced for a thousand years.

What He Gave to the Altar

It is right to frame the translation work as Nicholas himself framed it: not a side-task but the central labor of his life, the thing he gave to the altar that he could not otherwise serve. A missionary archbishop can ordain priests, build churches, and raise up catechists, but he cannot make a people pray in a tongue that has no words yet for the prayers. That want Nicholas set himself to fill, and he filled it. The texts were meant to endure — to outlast the man, the mission’s first generation, and the political weather of the Meiji and Taishō years — and they have. More than a century after his repose the Japanese Church still reads its Scriptures and sings its services in the language he and Nakai made, which is the plainest possible measure of what those four hours a night were for.

The endurance is not a sentiment but a present fact of liturgical life. The Orthodox Church of Japan to this day celebrates the Divine Liturgy and keeps the round of services in the Japanese that Nicholas and Nakai shaped, so that the worship of the Church glorified in 1970 still rests on the texts of the Meiji evenings (on the contemporary Church see Canonization and the Church Today). These are, on any reckoning, a monument of Meiji translation — among the most enduring literary products of that age of furious Japanese rendering of foreign learning, and unusual among them in being still in living daily use rather than consigned to the library. When a Japanese Orthodox congregation sings the Liturgy today (on the service itself see Orthodoxy Guide: The Divine Liturgy), it is praying in words settled more than a century ago by a Russian monk and a Confucian scholar, one verse at a time, between six and ten in the evening. Few translations of any kind have been so vindicated by survival.

References

St. Nicholas of Japan, Apostle to Japan (Monk Nicodemus Jones). OrthoChristian.com (orthochristian.com/51599.html), from the St. Herman Calendar 2011. (“Translation is the core of missionary work”; the centrality of translation to the mission.)
Nicholas of Japan. Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_of_Japan). (Nakai Tsugumaro, the kanbun academy, the call to Tokyo in 1882; the working method and the “another notebook” scene; the New Testament of 1901; the liturgical corpus and its continued use.)
The Apostle to Japan (Fr. Edward Pehanich). American Carpatho-Russian Orthodox Diocese (acrod.org). (“For thirty years he spent every evening from 6:00 till 10:00 on this project”; one verse at a time.)
Puzanova, The Orthodox Mission in Japan. University of Oxford DPhil thesis, 2020 (ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:27bf3331-8744-4e53-b614-98ebf80b9532). (“Semantic rather than literal translations, adapting the text to Japanese reality.”)
Saint Nicholas of Japan, Equal-to-the-Apostles. mission2nihon (mission2nihon.substack.com). (Nakai as Confucian scholar and lifelong collaborator; the partnership to 1912.)
orthodox-jp.com summary of the translation periods. (Scope and dating of the Scriptural and liturgical translations; the Abridged Octoechos of c. 1894–95.)