The Church in the Meiji Era

Nicholas’s mission was almost exactly coterminous with the Meiji period (1868–1912), the era of Japan’s headlong modernization, and the Orthodox Church grew up inside that transformation rather than against it. Drawing its first converts heavily from the displaced samurai of the defeated northeast, distinguished among the foreign missions by native clergy, classical-Japanese liturgy, and a deliberate refusal to serve Russian state interests, the Church became a genuinely Japanese institution arising within Meiji’s own ferment. This file frames the historical setting that made that possible — and that made the Church’s foreignness a standing vulnerability Nicholas spent his life answering.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox / Japanese (canonized 1970)

Meiji Japan

The arc of Nicholas’s life in Japan ran almost exactly parallel to the Meiji period (1868–1912). He had arrived in 1861, in the last years of the Tokugawa order; the Meiji Restoration of 1868 toppled the shogunate and restored, in name, the rule of the emperor, and the new imperial state then threw itself into a generation of headlong modernization and Westernization — industrialization, a Western-modeled army and navy, new schools, new law codes, a written constitution promulgated in 1889, and the wholesale importation of Western institutions (general Meiji history; Timeline of Orthodoxy in Japan, OrthodoxWiki, for the framing). When Nicholas died in 1912 the Meiji era died with him, almost to the year: the Meiji emperor died the same year, 1912. The Church he built was, in this sense, a Meiji institution from beginning to end — born in the upheaval of the Restoration and matured in the Westernizing decades that followed.

This coincidence is more than chronological. The very forces that were unsettling Japan — the collapse of the old domains, the dislocation of the warrior class, the rush of foreign ideas through a society newly opened — were the forces that gave the mission its opening. A faith from outside could find a hearing precisely because so much from outside was being heard at once.

Religious Freedom

The legal space for the Church was opened in two stages. First came the lifting of the old prohibition: the anti-Christian ban, in force since the Tokugawa edicts of the early seventeenth century, was effectively ended in February 1873, when the Meiji government removed the public notice-boards that had condemned the “evil sect” (see The Move to Tokyo). This did not make Christianity welcome, but it made it possible: for the first time since 1614 the faith could be preached and accepted openly.

Second came a positive, if qualified, guarantee. The Meiji Constitution of 1889, in Article 28, granted Japanese subjects freedom of religious belief — but conditionally, “within limits not prejudicial to peace and order, and not antagonistic to their duties as subjects” (Meiji Constitution (1889), Art. 28). The qualification mattered. Religious freedom was held within the bounds of public order and of the subject’s duties to the imperial state, and the state’s own reverence — the cult of the emperor and the rites of State Shinto — stood above and outside the freedom granted to ordinary belief. Within this guarded but real legal space the Orthodox Church grew openly through the second half of the Meiji period.

Early Japanese Orthodoxy had a distinctive social and regional character. It drew heavily from the former samurai class — the shizoku, the men who had been the warriors and administrators of the old order and who were, after the Restoration, displaced, stripped of their stipends and their station, and often morally unsettled by the collapse of the world they had been bred to serve (Timeline of Orthodoxy in Japan, OrthodoxWiki; Saint Nicholas of Japan, mission2nihon). To such men a faith offering meaning and discipline — a structure of devotion and self-mastery not unlike the ethos they had lost — had a particular appeal.

The pattern was regional as well as social. Orthodoxy took root with special strength in the northeast — the Tōhoku region, the old domains around Sendai and the north that had lost the Boshin War of 1868–69 to the imperial coalition (OrthodoxWiki; mission2nihon). The men of the defeated north were doubly displaced — losers in the civil war as well as casualties of the Restoration — and it was among them, the ex-samurai of the beaten domains, that the Church grew fastest. The very first convert had been such a man: Sawabe, a Shinto priest and swordsman of the Hakodate region (see The First Community). The concentration of early Japanese Orthodoxy in the northeast, among the former warrior class, is a noted feature of the Church’s history and one of the things that set it apart from the other Christian missions, which were strongest elsewhere.

Orthodoxy Among the Christian Missions

After 1873 the Orthodox mission was one of several Christian bodies at work in Meiji Japan, alongside the Protestant denominations — many of them American — and the Roman Catholics, all competing and laboring for converts in the same newly opened field (general mission history; OrthodoxWiki). Against that background the Orthodox mission was distinctive in several respects.

It was the work of a single charismatic founder, Nicholas, who gave it over half a century of continuous leadership where other bodies came and went with their personnel. It relied from very early on native clergy and lay catechists, Japanese evangelizing Japanese, rather than on a permanent staff of foreign clergy (see The Catechist System). It worshipped in classical Japanese, through the dignified liturgical translations Nicholas labored over for decades, so that the services were Japanese in language and register from the start (see Language and Culture). And — most consequentially — it held to a deliberate non-alignment with foreign political power. Nicholas kept the Church clear of Russian state interests, refusing to let the mission serve as an instrument of Russian influence in Japan (Perabo, “Patriotism in Wartime,” Public Orthodoxy; Puzanova, DPhil thesis, Oxford, 2020). This last principle, easy to state in peacetime, would become decisive when Russia and Japan went to war (see Staying With His Flock).

The Standing Vulnerability

For all these distinctives, the Church carried through the whole Meiji period a standing liability: it was foreign. Japanese nationalism, rising as the era went on, regarded Christianity with suspicion as a foreign and potentially subversive religion — a creed of outside loyalties in a state that increasingly demanded the undivided loyalty of its subjects. Orthodoxy was doubly exposed, for it had a Russian bishop at its head and was sustained by Russian money; in the eyes of a suspicious nationalism it could be read as an arm of the Russian Empire on Japanese soil (Perabo, Public Orthodoxy; Puzanova, 2020).

Nicholas’s entire strategy was, in effect, an answer to this vulnerability: to make the Church Japanese so thoroughly that its foreign origin would cease to define it. He reportedly refused to let the mission be an instrument of Russian influence and kept a careful distance from politics, so that the Church could not fairly be charged with serving a foreign state (Perabo; Puzanova). The native clergy, the Japanese liturgy, the lay catechists, the cathedral built in plain Japanese view in the capital — all of it served the single aim of rooting the Church in Japan rather than perching it on the country as a Russian outpost.

Nicholas and the Japanese

Behind the strategy lay a genuine love. Over his half-century in the country Nicholas came to love Japan and the Japanese deeply and to identify his own life entirely with them. The diaries record him reflecting, in a moment of self-assessment, that he could “see that I am of use only to Japan, to an insignificant corner of the world” (mission2nihon, Diaries entries) — a remark in which a flicker of melancholy at his narrow sphere is overwhelmed by the completeness of his self-gift to that one corner. He had learned the country from within, studying its language, history, and religions not as an enemy to be refuted but as a world to be understood and entered (see Asceticism and Method).

By the end of the Meiji era this lifelong identification with Japan had made Nicholas a respected public figure, not merely the head of a foreign sect. When he died in 1912 — the same year the Meiji emperor died — the imperial house honored him (see Repose and Recognition). It was a remarkable end for a man who had arrived under a death-penalty ban on his faith: the foreign monk whose Church had been a national vulnerability was mourned, at the close of the Meiji age, as a figure the Japanese state itself was willing to honor. The Church he left behind was neither a foreign enclave nor a tool of empire, but what he had set out to build — a genuinely Japanese institution arisen inside Meiji modernity.

References

Timeline of Orthodoxy in Japan. OrthodoxWiki (orthodoxwiki.org/Timeline_of_Orthodoxy_in_Japan). (The Meiji framing; the early converts drawn from the ex-samurai of the northeast and the defeated Boshin-War domains around Sendai.)
Saint Nicholas of Japan, Equal-to-the-Apostles. mission2nihon (mission2nihon.substack.com). (The samurai/shizoku makeup of early converts and the Tōhoku concentration; the Diaries entry, “I am of use only to Japan, to an insignificant corner of the world.”)
Betsy Perabo, Patriotism in Wartime. Public Orthodoxy (publicorthodoxy.org/2020/02/06/patriotism-in-wartime/). (Nicholas’s keeping of the Church clear of Russian state interests; the foreignness of a Russian-led, Russian-funded Church as a vulnerability in nationalist Japan.)
Puzanova, DPhil thesis (University of Oxford, 2020). (The Orthodox mission’s non-alignment with Russian political power; the standing tension with Japanese nationalism.)
Meiji Constitution (Constitution of the Empire of Japan, 1889), Article 28. (The qualified freedom of religious belief, “within limits not prejudicial to peace and order, and not antagonistic to their duties as subjects.”)
General histories of the Meiji period (1868–1912): the Restoration of 1868, the modernization program, the 1889 Constitution, and the death of the Meiji emperor in 1912.