Ministry to the Prisoners

Japan held tens of thousands of Russian prisoners of war during the Russo-Japanese War. With the consent of the Japanese government, Bishop Nicholas founded a society to care for their souls — and sent Japanese Orthodox priests who knew Russian into the camps to serve the Liturgy, hear confessions, and bring icons and crosses to the captives. The Japanese Church a Russian had built now ministered to Russian prisoners through Japanese clergy: a remarkable inversion, and the ripest fruit of his strategy of raising up an indigenous priesthood.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox / Japanese (canonized 1970)

The Prisoners

The war that put Nicholas in his impossible position (see Staying with His Flock) also filled Japan with Russians of a particular kind: prisoners. As the fighting on land and at sea went against Russia, Japan came to hold a very large number of Russian prisoners of war (OCA, Saint Nicholas, Enlightener of Japan; OrthoChristian, War and Peace for Holy Hierarch Nicholas of Japan; Wikipedia, Nicholas of Japan). [Disputed: the figures cited are “over 70,000” (OrthoChristian) and “~73,000” (OCA); the total is best given as a range of roughly 70,000–73,000, with the caveat that the number depends on whether one counts all the prisoners who passed through Japanese hands over the course of the war or the peak number held at any one time.]

They were distributed among camps across the country. The first and most famous was at Matsuyama, in Ehime Prefecture on the island of Shikoku, which still has a Russian prisoner-of-war cemetery; another large camp stood at Hamadera, near Osaka; and there were others besides (OCA; OrthoChristian; Wikipedia). Into Japan, in other words, came tens of thousands of Nicholas’s own countrymen — Orthodox men, far from home, captive in the land of his Church. The enemy’s soldiers were also his spiritual kin, and he treated the coincidence as a charge laid upon him.

It helps to set the ministry against the general history of how Japan handled these prisoners, for the conditions made the work possible. The Russo-Japanese War was fought in the first years after the 1899 Hague Convention had codified the obligations of belligerents toward prisoners of war, and Japan — newly arrived as a power on the world stage and acutely conscious of how the Western states were watching — made a deliberate point of conducting itself by the new international norms. The standard accounts describe a prisoner regime that was, for the era, comparatively organized and humane: prisoners registered and housed, fed and given medical care, their treatment held up as evidence of Japan’s standing among the civilized nations (general history, as reported in the standard accounts; OCA; Wikipedia). The claim is best made carefully — conditions varied from camp to camp, and the record is uneven — but the broad picture is of a captivity administered with an eye to international approval rather than of mere neglect.

The camp system itself grew with the war. Matsuyama was the first, opened early to receive the prisoners of the opening campaigns; as their numbers swelled, the system expanded until prisoners were held at many sites across Japan, Hamadera near Osaka among the largest (general history; OCA; OrthoChristian; Wikipedia). The very organization that made the camps tolerable also made them reachable: a regime that registered its prisoners and answered to international scrutiny was one that could, and did, permit a recognized religious body to enter and serve them.

The Society for the Prisoners

Nicholas acted within the law and with the cooperation of his hosts. With the consent of the Japanese government, he founded a society for the spiritual care of the prisoners — its name rendered in English as the “Society for the Spiritual Consolation of Prisoners of War,” or, in another translation of the same body, the Society for the Spiritual Comfort of Prisoners of War (OrthoChristian; OCA). That the Japanese state not only permitted but facilitated this work is itself significant. In the middle of a war against Russia, the government allowed a Russian bishop to organize systematic pastoral care for Russian captives — a measure of the trust that Nicholas and his Church had earned over four decades, and consonant with the relatively humane treatment Russian prisoners are generally reported to have received in this war (a point best stated generally and with caution, since prison conditions varied and the record is uneven).

The trust was not abstract. It rested on the very thing the war had just demonstrated — that the Japanese Orthodox Church was a Japanese institution loyal to Japan, not a Russian agency. Precisely because Nicholas had stayed, withdrawn from the prayer for victory, and blessed his flock’s patriotism, his Church was credible enough to be entrusted with the enemy’s prisoners.

Japanese Priests for Russian Captives

The most striking feature of the ministry is the one easiest to miss for its simple inversion of every expectation. Nicholas himself was generally not permitted to visit the camps in person; he worked from Tokyo, through letters and through his clergy (Wikipedia; OCA). And the clergy he sent were not Russian. He selected Japanese Orthodox priests who knew Russian and Church Slavonic and dispatched them to the camps — devotional accounts say reportedly five Russian-speaking priests, though this number belongs to the devotional tradition and is not firmly documented (present as reported, not as established fact). [Disputed: the figure of five Japanese priest-chaplains is given in devotional sources but not securely confirmed.]

These Japanese priests served the Divine Liturgy, heard confessions, brought the sacraments, and distributed icons, crosses, and books among the Russian captives; each prisoner is said to have received a small cross (OCA; St. John the Baptist Cathedral, Washington, D.C.; Wikipedia). Consider what this meant. A Russian had come to Japan forty years earlier and built, from nothing, a Church of Japanese Christians with a Japanese priesthood (see An Indigenous Church). Now, in time of war, that Japanese priesthood carried the sacraments of the Orthodox faith — in Slavonic — to Russian soldiers held captive in Japan. The pupils ministered to the founder’s countrymen; the mission’s clergy served the mother Church’s sons. It is the clearest single vindication of Nicholas’s whole method: had he built a Russian chaplaincy staffed by Russians, it would have collapsed with the legation in 1904, and there would have been no one to send. Because he had built an indigenous clergy, there were Japanese priests on hand to do for the Russian prisoners what no Russian in Japan was any longer free to do.

The specific identities of these priest-chaplains, however, cannot be responsibly named. The accessible sources do not confirm them, and the documentation of the individual chaplains awaits the Japanese-language scholarship — the work of Ushimaru and of Perabo — that has not yet reached the English devotional accounts. [Disputed/unverified: the names of the Japanese priest-chaplains are not established in accessible sources and are not asserted here.]

The Logistics of the Ministry

The practical shape of the work followed from the geography of the camps. The prisoners were not gathered in one place but scattered across Japan, from Shikoku to the outskirts of Osaka and beyond, and so the ministry had to be a traveling one. Japanese Orthodox priests, and lay helpers under them, went out from Tokyo to the camps, circuiting among the captive congregations much as the same clergy circuited among the scattered native communities of the Church in peacetime (on that circuiting pattern see An Indigenous Church). What they carried with them was the ordinary furniture of Orthodox worship adapted to a captive flock: Slavonic service books, by which the prisoners could follow and join the services in their own liturgical tongue; icons and crosses for the men and for the makeshift chapels set up in the camps; and devotional literature — Gospels, prayer books, and the like — for distribution among them (OCA; St. John the Baptist Cathedral; OrthoChristian; Wikipedia). The aim throughout was that a Russian soldier in a camp at Matsuyama or Hamadera should be able to pray, confess, and commune as he would have at home.

The deepest enabling condition, though, was linguistic, and the irony of it is worth stating plainly. A ministry to Russian prisoners required clergy who could serve in Church Slavonic and speak with the men in Russian — and such clergy existed in Japan, in number, only because Nicholas had spent four decades building an indigenous Church whose priests were trained in the Slavonic services and, in many cases, in the Russian language and theological tradition. The same labor that had produced a Japanese Scriptures and liturgy for the native Church (see The Japanese Scriptures and Liturgy) had also produced a Japanese clergy at home in the Slavonic and Russian texts, and it was this clergy that now formed the bridge to the captives. The translator’s work, undertaken so that Japanese might pray in Japanese, had as an unlooked-for fruit a body of Japanese priests able to serve Russians in Slavonic — the very thing the moment required.

In the Camps

Some texture of the work survives in Nicholas’s diaries. Of the camp at Hamadera he noted the prisoners’ illiteracy — that, as the report has it, “nine of ten captives could not read” — and the catechetical and charitable problem this posed: men who could not read the books and Gospels being distributed, and who needed to be reached by other means (attributed to the diaries as reported in the Wikipedia/Perabo material; a secondary devotional report, the Russian wording unverified against the Nakamura edition). The detail is characteristic of him. Even amid the consolation of captives, his missionary mind turned at once to the practical question of how the faith could actually be conveyed to men who could not read it — the same problem of literacy and catechesis that had shaped his whole work in Japan (see The Catechist System).

The books, crosses, icons, and liturgies were not, then, a mere gesture of comfort. They were the ordinary instruments of his ministry, now turned upon a captive congregation of his own countrymen, and adapted — as ever — to the people actually in front of his priests.

It is important to be exact about Nicholas’s own part, because it was a constrained one and the constraint is itself revealing. He was generally not permitted to go to the camps himself; a Russian bishop moving among Russian prisoners in wartime was more than the situation could bear, and he knew it (Wikipedia; OCA). His ministry to the captives was therefore conducted from Tokyo, through letters and through his clergy — organizing the society, dispatching and directing the priests, arranging the supply of books and crosses, and following the work at a remove through the reports that came back to him. The diaries are where that following-at-a-remove is recorded; the Hamadera literacy note is one surviving fragment of it, and the standard accounts treat the diaries as the principal window onto how the prisoner ministry looked from the side of the man who organized it (the Diaries, as reported in the Wikipedia/Perabo material; on the document see The Diaries). That Nicholas accomplished so much while barred from the camps is a measure of how completely the work had been handed over: he did not need to be present, because there were Japanese priests who could be present in his stead.

Legacy

The theological weight of the episode is best taken before its sentimental one. What the prisoner ministry enacted, in the most concrete form imaginable, was the universality that Nicholas had preached from the beginning: that the Church of Christ is not the chaplaincy of a nation, and that in the Kingdom of God there are, as he put it, no Japanese and no Russians. A Japanese Church, founded by a Russian, ministering through Japanese priests to Russian men taken captive in war by Japan — the configuration is almost too neat a parable, and it says exactly what Nicholas always said. Betsy Perabo’s study frames his thought through the image of a “two-story house”: above, the heavenly Kingdom, in which national divisions have no standing; below, the earthly nations, to which a Christian rightly belongs and owes a real loyalty, as Nicholas had taught his Japanese flock to be loyal to Japan even at war with his own homeland (Perabo, Russian Orthodoxy and the Russo-Japanese War). The prisoner ministry is the place where the two stories meet without contradiction: on the lower floor, Japanese Christians loyal to a Japan at war with Russia; on the upper, those same Christians serving captive Russians as brothers in Christ, with no sense that the one duty cancels the other. This is the Orthodox understanding of charity reaching across the lines of nation and war (see Orthodoxy Guide: Church and World), and Nicholas had built a Church capable of living it (see Staying with His Flock).

The episode left a long memory. Freed and surviving prisoners are reported to have remembered the kindness shown them, and the ministry to the prisoners is repeatedly cited — alongside his decision to stay — as proof of the integrity of the mission and of the Christian universality Nicholas embodied (OrthoChristian; OCA). Here was an Orthodoxy that did not stop at the borders of nation or the lines of a war: a Russian bishop in an enemy land, organizing Japanese priests to carry the sacraments to Russian prisoners, with the enemy government’s blessing. The “two-story house” of his theology — the heavenly Kingdom above, where there are no Japanese and no Russians, and the earthly nations below — was nowhere more visible than here (see Staying with His Flock).

The memory has a physical monument. At Matsuyama, where the camp system began, a Russian prisoner-of-war cemetery remains — the graves of men who died in captivity far from home, tended and remembered long after the war that brought them there (OCA; Wikipedia). The cemetery, with the recurring notice of the prisoner ministry in later accounts of Nicholas’s life and glorification, is the durable form of the episode’s afterlife: enduring proof, set in stone in Shikoku, that the Church a Russian built in Japan met the Russian dead of an enemy war with reverence rather than enmity.

It is also, fittingly, part of why he is remembered as he is. The care of the prisoners belongs to the body of conduct for which Nicholas was honored in his lifetime and glorified after it, and it features regularly in the accounts of his repose and recognition (see Repose and Recognition). The ministry to the prisoners is the indigenous Church turned outward in love toward the very nation from which it had come — the surest evidence that what Nicholas had planted in Japan was not a colony of Russia but a Church of Christ (see An Indigenous Church).

References

Saint Nicholas, Enlightener of Japan. Orthodox Church in America (oca.org/saints/lives/2026/02/03/100455-saint-nicholas-enlightener-of-japan), February 3. (The number of prisoners, “~73,000”; the camps; the Society for the prisoners; Japanese Russian-speaking priests sent to serve; the distribution of crosses; Nicholas himself not visiting the camps.)
War and Peace for Holy Hierarch Nicholas of Japan (trans. Liubov Ambrose). OrthoChristian.com (orthochristian.com/151103.html). (The prisoners, “over 70,000”; the founding of the society; the legacy of the captives’ remembered kindness. Wartime quotations are devotional translations, unverified against the Russian Nakamura edition of the diaries — see METHODOLOGY.)
Nicholas of Japan. Wikipedia. (The prisoner-of-war camps including Matsuyama and Hamadera; Japanese priests sent to the captives; Nicholas working through clergy and letters rather than visiting; the reported Hamadera diary note on prisoner illiteracy, drawing on Perabo material.)
Equal-to-the-Apostles St. Nicholas of Japan. St. John the Baptist Cathedral, Washington, D.C. (stjohndc.org/en/orthodoxy-foundation/saints/equal-apostles-st-nicholas-japan). (The Japanese priests serving the Russian prisoners; icons, crosses, and books distributed.)
Betsy Perabo. Russian Orthodoxy and the Russo-Japanese War. London: Bloomsbury, 2017. (The wider scholarly context for the prisoner ministry; the Japanese-language documentation, with Ushimaru, in which the individual chaplains’ names await confirmation.)