Nikolai-do: The Holy Resurrection Cathedral

The great cathedral on the Surugadai knoll, raised over seven years and consecrated in 1891, that crowned the mission Nicholas had planted in secret thirty years before. Designed in Russia by Mikhail Shchurupov and executed on the ground by the British architect Josiah Conder, it dominated the Tokyo skyline and was named by the city itself, after the man who built it, “Nikolai-do” — Nicholas’s hall. Toppled by the 1923 earthquake and rebuilt under his successor, it stands today as Japan’s principal Orthodox cathedral and the seat of the Metropolitan of All Japan.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox / Japanese (canonized 1970)

The Hill at Surugadai

The site was already the heart of the mission. In 1872 Nicholas had moved the center of the Russian Ecclesiastical Mission from the northern port of Hakodate to the capital, and on Surugadai hill in the Kanda district of central Tokyo — high ground overlooking the city — he had purchased a plot and raised a two-story mission building containing a house-church and schools (see The Move to Tokyo). For two decades that house-church served the growing community. But Surugadai had been chosen with the long view in mind, and from early on Nicholas intended that the hill should one day carry not a chapel but a cathedral — a building that would stand in plain Japanese view as the visible sign that the secret community of the 1860s had become a public, national Church (Holy Resurrection Cathedral, OrthodoxWiki; Holy Resurrection Cathedral, Wikipedia).

The choice of so prominent a site was itself a statement. Surugadai stood high enough that the cathedral, once built, would overlook the grounds of the Imperial Palace — a fact that would later draw nationalist resentment, but which Nicholas accepted as the proper dignity of a Church he believed belonged in the center of the nation’s life, not at its foreign margins (OrthodoxWiki; Japan Experience, “Nikolai-do”). The dedication was kept from the mission’s beginnings: the Resurrection, the same title borne by the little consular chapel at Hakodate where Nicholas had first served (see Arrival in Japan (1861)).

The Design: Shchurupov and Conder

The cathedral’s authorship is best stated in layers, because the popular accounts compress it. The original design and architectural plans were the work of the Russian architect Mikhail A. Shchurupov of St. Petersburg, who drew up the Byzantine-Revival scheme in Russia and sent the plans out to Japan (Holy Resurrection Cathedral, OrthodoxWiki; Holy Resurrection Cathedral, Wikipedia). The on-site construction, supervision, and local adaptation of those plans were entrusted to the British architect Josiah Conder, then resident in Tokyo and the leading Western architect of the Meiji capital — the man who, more than any other foreigner, gave Meiji Tokyo its Western public buildings (OrthodoxWiki; Wikipedia). [Disputed: some accounts loosely name Conder as “the designer” of the cathedral; the careful attribution distinguishes Shchurupov’s design from Conder’s on-site execution and adaptation.] The builder named in some accounts was Nagasato Taisuke (OrthodoxWiki).

The result was a substantial work of Byzantine-Revival architecture in brick, crowned by a great central dome and accompanied by a tall bell tower — a form deliberately Eastern Christian in its silhouette, set down in a city then filling with Western banks and ministries in the Italianate and neo-Renaissance manner that Conder himself was helping to spread. The cathedral was thus at once foreign to Japan and foreign to the rest of Meiji Westernization: not a copy of a European church but an Orthodox temple, raised by a partnership of a Russian designer and a British builder for a Japanese congregation.

Building and Consecration (1884–1891)

Construction began in 1884 and ran for roughly seven years (OrthodoxWiki; Wikipedia). The labor and the cost were both formidable. The total outlay came to about 240,000 yen — “a vast sum in those days” — and the money was raised in large part through Nicholas’s own fundraising tour of Russia, where Russian donors gave to the building of a cathedral they would never see, in a country most of them could scarcely imagine (Holy Resurrection Cathedral, OrthodoxWiki; Japan Experience, “Nikolai-do”). That the great Japanese cathedral was built chiefly on Russian charity is a fact worth holding in mind: it was the standing financial dependence on Russia that would, after the Revolution, leave the rebuilt cathedral to be paid for by the Japanese themselves.

The cathedral was consecrated on 8 March 1891 (OrthodoxWiki; Wikipedia). The year 1891 is firm and is the date around which the whole history of the building turns. By then Nicholas had been a bishop for eleven years, the anti-Christian ban had been lifted for eighteen, and the catechist-driven mission had spread Orthodox communities across the country (see The Catechist System). The consecration of so large and so visible a cathedral set the seal on all of it: the mission now had a mother church to match its reach.

“Nikolai-do”

In its finished form the cathedral was one of the tallest and most conspicuous buildings in Tokyo. The cathedral itself rose to about 34.5 meters, and the bell tower to about 37.7 meters (OrthodoxWiki; Wikipedia). Until the high-rise building of the 1960s overtook it, it dominated the skyline of the Surugadai district, its dome and tower visible across the surrounding city and standing above the nearby Imperial Palace grounds (OrthodoxWiki; Japan Experience).

It was the people of Tokyo, not the Church, who gave the building the name it has carried ever since. The city took to calling it “Nikorai-do” / “Nikolai-do” (ニコライ堂) — “Nicholas’s hall,” or “Nicholas’s temple” — after the Russian missionary whose work it crowned (OrthodoxWiki; Wikipedia; Japan Experience). The name is a small monument in itself. Tokyo did not name the cathedral for its dedication, the Resurrection, nor for the Russia that paid for it, but for the man; the city identified the great brick church on the hill with one foreign monk who had lived among them for thirty years, and so the building became, in the popular tongue, simply his. It remains Japan’s principal Orthodox cathedral and the seat of the Metropolitan of All Japan to this day (OrthodoxWiki; see Canonization and the Church Today).

The 1923 Earthquake and the Rebuilding

The remainder of the cathedral’s story falls after Nicholas’s death in 1912, and belongs to the building rather than to the saint; but it cannot be left out, because the cathedral that stands today is not in every respect the one he consecrated.

On 1 September 1923 the Great Kantō Earthquake struck the Tokyo region. The cathedral’s bell tower toppled, falling onto and collapsing the central dome, and the fire that swept the city afterward destroyed the iconostasis and the interior (OrthodoxWiki; Wikipedia; St. Nicholas Center, gazetteer entry 285). Among the losses believed suffered in the disaster were Nicholas’s diaries, long thought to have been burned in the fire — though they were in fact later recovered, and have since become the chief window into his inner life (see The Diaries). For a time the cathedral that had crowned the mission stood gutted and broken on its hill.

The rebuilding fell to Nicholas’s successor, Archbishop (later Metropolitan) Sergius (Tikhomirov), and it was carried out under conditions Nicholas had never faced. Bolshevik Russia could no longer send money — the source that had paid for the original cathedral was simply gone — and so the funds were raised domestically in Japan, including through choir concerts given by the Japanese faithful (OrthodoxWiki; Wikipedia). The rebuilding architect was Okada Shinichirō, and the reconstructed cathedral was re-consecrated on 15 December 1929, now with a modified, shorter conical bell tower and a simpler dome and interior than Shchurupov’s original (OrthodoxWiki; Wikipedia). In this altered but recognizable form it survived the bombing of Tokyo in the Second World War and stands today, designated an Important Cultural Property of Japan (OrthodoxWiki; Wikipedia).

There is a quiet fittingness in the way the cathedral was saved. The original Nikolai-do had been built on Russian money for a Japanese Church; when Russia fell away, it was the Japanese Church — the indigenous Church Nicholas had labored to create (see An Indigenous Church) — that paid to raise its mother church a second time. The building that the city had named for the man came, in the end, to be sustained by the people he had given it to.

References

Holy Resurrection Cathedral. OrthodoxWiki (orthodoxwiki.org/Holy_Resurrection_Cathedral_(Tokyo,_Japan)). (Shchurupov’s design and Conder’s on-site execution; Nagasato Taisuke as builder; construction 1884 over about seven years; consecration 8 March 1891; the ~240,000-yen cost and Russian fundraising; heights of ~34.5 m and ~37.7 m; the “Nikolai-do” name; the 1923 earthquake and fire; the rebuilding under Sergius, Okada Shinichirō as architect, re-consecration 15 December 1929; Important Cultural Property status.)
Holy Resurrection Cathedral. Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy_Resurrection_Cathedral). (Byzantine-Revival brick design; the layered Shchurupov/Conder attribution; dimensions; the skyline prominence into the 1960s; the 1923 collapse of tower and dome; the domestic rebuilding and 1929 re-consecration.)
Nikolai-do. Japan Experience (japan-experience.com/all-about-japan/tokyo/attractions-excursions/nikolai-do). (The ~240,000-yen cost as “a vast sum in those days,” raised through the Russian fundraising tour; the cathedral overlooking the Imperial Palace; the popular “Nikolai-do” name.)
Holy Resurrection Cathedral (Nikolai-do), Tokyo. St. Nicholas Center (stnicholascenter.org/gazetteer/285). (The 1923 earthquake damage and the fate of the building; the diaries believed lost.)