Staying with His Flock

When war broke out in 1904 between Japan and Russia — his adopted nation and his homeland — Bishop Nicholas was the only Russian bishop in the country and a subject of the enemy. While the diplomats and the Russian community evacuated, he chose to remain in Tokyo with his Japanese flock; he withdrew from leading the public prayers, blessed his Japanese Christians to do their patriotic duty, and prayed privately for peace. It is the central episode of his life and the vindication of forty years of building a genuinely Japanese Church.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox / Japanese (canonized 1970)

The War and the Impossible Position

The Russo-Japanese War began in February 1904 and ended with the Treaty of Portsmouth in September 1905 (War and Peace for Holy Hierarch Nicholas of Japan, OrthoChristian; Nicholas of Japan, Wikipedia). For most of the world it was a contest of two empires over Manchuria and Korea. For one man in Tokyo it was something else entirely: his adopted nation and his homeland had gone to war, and he belonged wholly to both. Nicholas was a subject of Russia — the enemy power — and the only Russian bishop in Japan, the head of a Church of some thirty thousand Japanese Christians whose country was now fighting his own.

The position was, on its face, impossible. As the war opened, the Russian legation closed and the Russian colony in Japan evacuated. Nicholas alone among the Russians chose to stay (OrthoChristian; OCA, Saint Nicholas, Enlightener of Japan; Wikipedia). He had decided long before that he would not abandon the people he had spent his life gathering. His reasoning was not sentiment but ecclesiology: the bishop belongs to his flock, and his flock was Japanese. To leave would have been to confess that the Church he had built was, after all, a Russian thing — a colonial chaplaincy that folded up when the empire withdrew. He stayed precisely to prove that it was not.

Withdrawing from the Public Prayers

Having stayed, Nicholas faced the question that the staying made acute: for whom does a Russian bishop pray when Russia is killing the countrymen of his own spiritual children? His answer was as precise as it was costly. He ceased personally to participate in the public liturgical services and prayed privately at home, giving himself instead to the translation work and suspending his correspondence with Russia (OrthoChristian; Saint Nicholas of Japan, Equal-to-the-Apostles, St. John the Baptist Cathedral, Washington, D.C.).

The reasoning he gave for the withdrawal survives — though, as throughout this period, only in devotional English translation. He explained that he could not in conscience lead public prayer for one side: “Before this time, I prayed for the welfare and peace of the Japanese Empire. But at this moment, since war was proclaimed between Japan and my country, I, a subject of Russia, cannot pray for the victory of Japan over my own motherland…” (in the devotional translation given by OrthoChristian, rendered by Liubov Ambrose; the precise Russian wording awaits checking against the Nakamura edition of the diaries). Yet neither could he, as their father, pray for Russia’s victory over his Japanese children. The prayer for victory was therefore impossible for him in either direction; so he stepped back from leading it and prayed, privately, for peace. The distinction is the hinge of the whole episode: he did not abandon the liturgy of his Church — the daily services went on, led by the Japanese clergy — he simply removed his own person from the public petition for arms.

Blessing the Japanese to Do Their Duty

The withdrawal was only half of his answer, and the lesser half. The crucial act was what he told his Japanese Christians to do — for what was impossible for a Russian subject was not impossible for them. He instructed the Japanese faithful that they, as subjects of the Japanese Emperor, should pray for their country and fulfill their patriotic duty: to fight for Japan was their rightful obligation, and their Orthodox faith neither forbade it nor made them less Japanese.

In his encyclical to the Japanese Church of 11 February 1904, and in a diary entry of the same days, he set this out plainly. He told them (again in devotional translation) to “Pray to God that He give victory to your emperor’s army… do everything that is required of you by love for your Fatherland”; and, of those called to the front, “Should anyone amongst you go into battle, go and fight… not out of hatred for your enemy, but out of love for your fellow countrymen… To love one’s country is holy” (the 11 February 1904 encyclical as carried by OrthoChristian and the Chinese Orthodoxy archive; presented here as devotional translation, not yet verified against the Russian). The pastoral genius of the act lies in this asymmetry. Nicholas asked of himself a renunciation that his own nationality demanded, while releasing his flock into the full and legitimate exercise of theirs. He did not make Japanese Christians choose between their faith and their country; he told them, in effect, that the faith required them to be good Japanese.

The Two-Story House

The theology beneath this conduct has been read most carefully by the historian Betsy Perabo, whose study Russian Orthodoxy and the Russo-Japanese War (Bloomsbury, 2017) and her essay Patriotism in Wartime (Public Orthodoxy, 6 February 2020) supply the interpretive backbone for understanding what Nicholas was doing. Perabo draws out an image native to Nicholas’s own thinking — a “two-story house”. On the upper floor is the heavenly Kingdom, where, as Nicholas held, there are “no Japanese, no Russians,” but only children of one Heavenly Father. On the lower floor are the earthly kingdoms, with their real and legitimate loyalties — the nations, the emperors, the duties of citizenship (Perabo, Patriotism in Wartime, Public Orthodoxy).

The two floors are not in competition. Love of one’s own country, on Perabo’s reading of Nicholas, is “natural and holy”; it belongs to the lower story by right and is no betrayal of the upper. This is why Orthodox faith did not make Japanese Christians disloyal to Japan, and why a Russian bishop could in good conscience bless them to fight Russia. Each man owes his nation its due on the earthly floor; all men are one family on the heavenly floor; and the bishop’s task in wartime is to keep the staircase clear — to hold the two together without collapsing either into the other. Nicholas lived in both stories at once, and the strain of doing so is exactly what the war cost him. (On the spiritual discipline underlying this, see Asceticism and Method.)

The Personal Cost

The cost was real, and the diaries record it. Nicholas was a Russian whose own country was killing the countrymen of his spiritual children, surrounded by a people at war with his homeland and cut off from that homeland by his own choice and by his suspended correspondence. The isolation was acute. “What I find truly distressing is that the fire rages on deep inside my heart,” he wrote; “There is not a single soul with whom I can share thoughts… so utterly alone, no one but the Japanese around me…” (OrthoChristian, from the Nakamura/Hyperion diaries; given here in devotional translation, the Russian wording awaiting verification against the Nakamura edition). The line is not self-pity but a precise statement of his condition: he had given himself so completely to the Japanese that in the one season when he most needed a fellow Russian, there was none, by his own decision. The diaries of these years are among the most revealing he kept (see The Diaries).

The grief ran in both directions. In October 1904 he authorized and oversaw a funeral and memorial service for Japanese Orthodox soldiers killed in the war — his own children, fallen fighting his homeland — and his Christmas-Eve 1904 diary records his grief at the Russian losses too (Perabo, Patriotism in Wartime, Public Orthodoxy). He mourned on both floors of the house at once. Alongside this care for his own flock ran his extraordinary labor for the enemy’s captives, the tens of thousands of Russian prisoners of war held in Japan, served through his Japanese clergy (see Ministry to the Prisoners).

The Church Proven Japanese

The vindication came in the survival. By staying, by withdrawing from the prayer for victory, and by blessing his flock’s patriotism, Nicholas demonstrated — to Orthodox and non-Christian Japanese alike — that the Japanese Orthodox Church was genuinely Japanese, and not an instrument of Russian political influence (OrthoChristian; Perabo). In a war that turned every Russian thing in Japan into an object of suspicion, the Church might easily have been broken as a fifth column. Instead it came through the war intact, its loyalty to Japan publicly proven by the conduct of its Russian founder. This is the climax of the whole story this collection tells: the long mission of enculturation — of building not a Russian colony but a Japanese Church — was tested by the hardest possible test and vindicated by it (see An Indigenous Church).

The recognition was explicit, and it came from the highest quarter on both sides. At the end of 1905, Emperor Nicholas II of Russia wrote to him: “Fulfilling the covenant of Christ, you did not abandon the flock entrusted to your care… in the midst of war and strife, to preserve peace, faith and love in the Church built by your labors. You have shown us all how the Orthodox Church of Christ, alien to worldly dominion and every tribal enmity, equally embraces with love all tribes and peoples…” (OrthoChristian; given here in translation). For this wartime conduct, among other things, Nicholas was elevated to the rank of archbishop — Archbishop of Tokyo and All Japan (see The Move to Tokyo). [Disputed: the OCA gives the date of the elevation as 24 March 1906; Wikipedia gives 1907.] That a Russian bishop should be honored by the Russian Tsar for refusing to pray for Russia’s victory is the whole paradox of the episode in a single sentence — and the surest sign that what he had done was understood, even at the time, as something more than politics.

In staying with his flock, Nicholas gave the clearest answer of his life to the oldest question of the Church’s life in the world: how the universal Body of Christ stands toward the nations and their wars (see Orthodoxy Guide: Church and World). He neither baptized the war nor fled it. He stayed, suffered the division in his own heart, and held the two stories of the house together — and the Church he had built was shown, in the testing, to belong to the people among whom it stood.

See Also

References

  • War and Peace for Holy Hierarch Nicholas of Japan (trans. Liubov Ambrose). OrthoChristian.com (orthochristian.com/151103.html). (His decision to remain alone; the withdrawal from public prayer and his reasoning; the 11 February 1904 encyclical to the Japanese Church; the diary lines on his isolation; the 1905 letter of Emperor Nicholas II. All quotations herein are devotional English translations, not verified against the Russian Nakamura edition of the diaries — see METHODOLOGY.)
  • Betsy Perabo. Russian Orthodoxy and the Russo-Japanese War. London: Bloomsbury, 2017; and Patriotism in Wartime. Public Orthodoxy (publicorthodoxy.org/2020/02/06/patriotism-in-wartime/), 6 February 2020. (The “two-story house” image; love of country as “natural and holy”; the October 1904 memorial for fallen Japanese Orthodox soldiers; the Christmas-Eve 1904 grief at Russian losses. The scholarly backbone for the theology of this file.)
  • Saint Nicholas, Enlightener of Japan. Orthodox Church in America (oca.org/saints/lives/2026/02/03/100455-saint-nicholas-enlightener-of-japan), February 3. (His remaining in Tokyo; the elevation to archbishop, dated 24 March 1906.)
  • 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 withdrawal from the public services and private prayer for peace.)
  • Nicholas of Japan. Wikipedia. (The dates of the war; his remaining when the Russian community evacuated; the elevation to archbishop, dated 1907.)
  • Chinese Orthodoxy archive (chineseorthodoxy.blogspot.com). (A carrying of the 11 February 1904 encyclical text used above; devotional translation.)