An Indigenous Church

The shape of the Church Nicholas built: a body governed conciliarly through general councils of clergy and lay delegates from 1874 onward; staffed and increasingly run by the Japanese themselves; pressed toward financial self-support while still substantially funded from Russia in his lifetime; and, by his death in 1912, the largest indigenous Orthodox community in Asia — though the very word “indigenous” carries a scholarly dispute that this file does not suppress.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox / Japanese (canonized 1970)

Government by Council

The most distinctive feature of the Japanese Church under Nicholas was the way it was governed: not by the bishop’s command alone but through regular general councils — sobor — that brought together the clergy and lay delegates of the whole Church. These councils met from 1874 onward (Timeline of Orthodoxy in Japan, OrthodoxWiki; Puzanova, DPhil thesis, Oxford 2020). [Careful wording: the sources do not document an unbroken yearly cadence, and this file does not claim one; what they attest is a settled pattern of general councils across Nicholas’s episcopate rather than a strict annual rhythm.]

The first general council was held in May 1874. The second, on 12 July 1875, was the occasion of the first Japanese ordinations: at it Paul Sawabe — the former Shinto priest and swordsman who had been the mission’s first convert (see Sawabe the Samurai) — was ordained the first Japanese priest, and John Sakai the first deacon, by Bishop Paul of Kamchatka (Timeline of Orthodoxy in Japan, OrthodoxWiki). Later dated councils mark the institution’s continuity: an “All Japan Council of 1882,” attested by a surviving group photograph, and the council of 1903, which, on Nicholas’s own recommendation, adopted a financial plan directed toward the Church’s independence (OrthodoxWiki; Puzanova). Alongside the broad councils a standing Council of Priests met regularly through the year — it is found in session, for instance, in July 1904, in the early weeks of the war (Puzanova).

What made these gatherings more than consultative was that decisions were taken collectively. Puzanova, working from the diaries and the mission’s records, states plainly that “Nikolai’s opinion was not always pivotal since decisions were taken collectively” (Puzanova, p. 194). The councils included lay delegates from every congregation (Barbara Lacey, St. Nikolai of Japan, Holy Trinity Orthodox Church, Connecticut), so that the scattered communities across the country had a voice in the running of the whole. Practical matters of the most concrete kind were settled here: the catechists’ pay and the budgets that supported them were fixed in council together with the Council of Priests (Puzanova, p. 197; on the catechists themselves see The Catechist System). The conciliar habit was not merely ceremonial; it reached into the money and the manpower on which the mission ran.

A vivid measure of how broadly the Church’s voice was constituted comes from 1888, when an address from the Japanese Church was sent over the signatures of 105 Japanese Christians — clergy, catechists, and parish representatives together (Puzanova). This was a Church that could speak in its own name, through its own people, in numbers.

The conciliar form was not an administrative convenience but the embodiment of a theological ideal native to the tradition Nicholas brought with him. The Russian Orthodox world of the nineteenth century had a word for the principle that the Church is a communion in which the whole body — bishops, clergy, and laity together — bears the truth and shares responsibility for it: sobornost’, conciliarity, the very root that gives the council its name (on this conciliar ideal in the Russian tradition see Orthodoxy Guide: The Russian Orthodox Tradition). A mission could have been run as a pure hierarchy — the bishop deciding, the converts obeying — and many missions of the era were. What Nicholas instituted instead was a structure in which lay delegates from every congregation sat in council and decisions were taken collectively, so that, as Puzanova observes from the records, his own opinion “was not always pivotal” (Puzanova, p. 194). The contrast with a top-down mission is precisely the point: a Church governed conciliarly is one in which the faithful are not the objects of evangelism but its co-subjects, charged with the life of their own communities. Whether or not Nicholas reasoned in these explicit terms — and the historiographic question of his motives is taken up below — the institution he left behind gave concrete, Japanese form to the Orthodox conviction that the Church is conciliar by its nature, governed in council rather than by decree (Puzanova; Timeline of Orthodoxy in Japan, OrthodoxWiki).

Self-Support: A Mixed Model

It is easy to read the conciliar government as a deliberate march toward independence, and easy to overstate it. Nicholas himself drew a careful distinction that the sources preserve: between financial self-sufficiency, which he genuinely sought, and administrative independence from the Russian Church, which is a separate question (Puzanova). The institutional expression of the first was the Church Property Society (Seikyo-okuwai iji saidan), which Nicholas created and registered under Japanese law so that it could hold church property and receive Japanese donations in a legally secure form (Puzanova, p. 198). This was a real step toward putting the Church’s material life on a Japanese footing.

But the same records make the limits of that self-support equally plain. Through Nicholas’s lifetime the mission remained substantially funded from Russia. A memorandum of 1909 describes the arrangement directly: “half comes from the Holy Synod and half from the Orthodox Missionary Society in Moscow” (Puzanova, pp. 196–97). The earlier figures point the same way — on the order of 23,800 roubles a year from the Orthodox Missionary Society, with a further 2,000 from Moscow (Puzanova, p. 178). The Russian Synod and the Orthodox Missionary Society were, in plain terms, the financial spine of the work for decades (on these institutions see Orthodoxy Guide: The Russian Orthodox Tradition). Only late, and partially, does the balance begin to shift: by 1911 Nicholas could point to parishes moving toward self-financing (Puzanova, p. 201). The honest summary is the mixed one — a Church increasingly self-supporting, yet still substantially Russian-funded when its founder died.

The tension in this arrangement was real and worth naming, because it cuts to the heart of what kind of Church Nicholas was building. On one side stood his genuine and explicit drive toward financial self-sufficiency: a Church that paid its own catechists, maintained its own buildings, and met its own needs from Japanese giving would be a Church rooted in Japanese soil rather than perpetually dependent on a foreign treasury. The Church Property Society, registered under Japanese law to hold property and receive Japanese donations in a legally secure form (Puzanova, p. 198), was the institutional instrument of exactly that aim — a vehicle by which the Church’s material life could be vested in Japan and in Japanese hands, durable in Japanese law whatever happened in Russia. On the other side stood the plain arithmetic of the present: the Synod and the Missionary Society together still supplied the larger part of the mission’s running costs, and the move toward self-financing parishes had only begun in Nicholas’s last years. He held the two together without pretending they were resolved. The long-term aim was that the Church should stand on its own; the short-term reality was that it could not yet do so. Puzanova’s reading of the records keeps both sides in view, and so must any honest account: a founder steadily building the legal and financial scaffolding of independence, over a Church that in his own lifetime still leaned on Russian money to survive (Puzanova, pp. 178, 196–98, 201).

The Scholarly Dispute

[Disputed: interpretation.] The traditional, hagiographic account presents Nicholas as a missionary who set out by design to plant a Japanese Orthodox Church — who chose Japanese catechists and ordained Japanese priests as a matter of deliberate indigenizing principle. Puzanova’s 2020 Oxford study revises this story. On her reading, Nicholas “never strove to create a Japanese Orthodox Church independent of the Russian Church,” and his heavy reliance on Japanese catechists and priests was driven substantially “out of necessity” — by the chronic shortage of Russian personnel and the limits of Russian funds — rather than by a programmatic theology of enculturation (Puzanova, DPhil 2020).

This counter-reading is presented here as a genuine scholarly position, not dismissed. It does not erase what the rest of this file documents — the councils were real, the lay delegates were real, the Japanese clergy and catechists carried the Church — but it reframes the motive. The reader is owed both accounts: the traditional one, which sees principled indigenization, and the revisionist one, which sees a Russian mission that became Japanese-staffed largely because it had to. The facts of the structure are not in dispute between them; the intention behind it is. The events of the Russo-Japanese War, when the Japanese Church held together as Japanese while Russia and Japan were at war, are the case most often cited on the traditional side (see Staying With His Flock).

It is worth setting the two readings side by side as fairly as possible, because this is a genuine historiographic question and not a settled matter that piety has merely obscured (see Methodology). The traditional account can point to a great deal: the deliberate cultivation of Japanese catechists from the very first years, the early ordination of Japanese priests, the conciliar government that gave the laity a real voice, the immense labour of translating the services and Scriptures into Japanese, and above all the wartime evidence — a Church that, when Russia and Japan went to war, remained loyally Japanese and held together as a Japanese body. From these facts the hagiographic tradition draws a coherent inference: that Nicholas intended, from early on, to plant a Church that would be Japanese in its people, its language, and eventually its governance. The revisionist account does not deny any of those facts; it questions the inference. Puzanova’s contention is that the mission’s heavy reliance on Japanese personnel grew “out of necessity” — because Russia never sent enough clergy or money — and that Nicholas “never strove to create a Japanese Orthodox Church independent of the Russian Church” (Puzanova, DPhil 2020). On this reading the indigenization was, at least in part, an adaptation forced by scarcity rather than the unfolding of a programmatic theology of enculturation. The two positions converge on the same visible Church and diverge on the intention behind it, and the evidence — much of it drawn from the same diaries — genuinely underdetermines the question of motive. The methodology of this collection asks that such a dispute be held open rather than collapsed to one side: a reader is better served by seeing the live tension between principled design and adaptive necessity than by a tidy verdict that flattens it (see Methodology).

A Mission in Its Wider Setting

The Japanese Church did not arise in isolation, and its significance is clearer when it is set in the longer history of Orthodox mission to which it belonged. Nicholas inherited, directly and consciously, the tradition of the Russian missions in the North Pacific — above all the work of St. Innocent (Veniaminov), the apostle of Alaska and Siberia, who had laboured to render the services and Scriptures into native languages, to form a native clergy, and to let the Church take the shape of the peoples it reached (on that earlier mission see St. Herman of Alaska, the first of the Alaskan missionaries). It was St. Innocent, by then Metropolitan of Moscow, who as head of the Orthodox Missionary Society stood behind the support of the Japanese work, and the methods Nicholas practised — translation, a native catechist corps, patient enculturation — are recognizably the Alaskan-Siberian pattern carried west across the Pacific to a very different and far more populous mission field. Measured against that inheritance and against the other Orthodox ventures of its era, the Church Nicholas built was, by his death, the most successful indigenous Orthodox Church in Asia — Japanese in its membership, its working clergy, and its governance to a degree no other Orthodox mission on the continent could claim. It thereby raised, in a concrete case, the wider question of how a local Church grows toward maturity and, in time, toward autonomy within the communion of Orthodox Churches (on local and autonomous Churches in the Orthodox world see Orthodoxy Guide: World Orthodoxy).

The Church at His Death (1912)

By the time Nicholas died in February 1912 he left a Church of tens of thousands. The exact figures vary considerably from source to source, and they are best presented as ranges rather than as a single number. The one figure with primary standing is 33,017, drawn from Nicholas’s own jubilee report of 1911.

Orthodox Christians: [Disputed: 33,017 (Nicholas’s own 1911 report, as given by OrthodoxWiki, OCA, and Sanidopoulos); “about 33,000” (OrthoChristian, Wikipedia); 34,110 (the Connecticut canonization document); “slightly more than 34,000” (Puzanova, citing G. Sablina, 150 let pravoslaviya v Yaponii); “over 35,000” (ACROD / Pehanich)].
Communities / congregations: [Disputed: 266 (OCA, OrthoChristian, OrthodoxWiki, Wikipedia, Sanidopoulos); 265 (ACROD)].
Japanese clergy: [Disputed: 35 priests and 6 deacons (OrthodoxWiki, Sanidopoulos); 34 priests and 8 deacons (the Connecticut canonization document); 40 priests-and-deacons combined (OrthoChristian); 32 priests (ACROD)].
Catechists: [Disputed: 116 (OrthodoxWiki, Sanidopoulos); 115 (the Connecticut canonization document)].
Churches / chapels: the most divergent of all — [Disputed: 175 churches and 8 cathedrals (OrthoChristian); 7 churches, 276 chapels, 175 meeting houses, and 2 cathedrals (the Connecticut canonization document) — apparently the same underlying counts under swapped labels; 96 churches and 265 chapels (ACROD)].

(Sources for the statistics: OCA; OrthoChristian, orthochristian.com/51599.html; Nicholas of Japan, OrthodoxWiki; Wikipedia; John Sanidopoulos, johnsanidopoulos.com; the Connecticut canonization document, orthodoxct.org; ACROD, acrod.org; Puzanova, DPhil 2020.)

Behind the variance the shape is clear enough: a body of more than thirty-three thousand Orthodox Christians, organized in some two hundred and sixty-six communities, served by between thirty and forty Japanese clergy and well over a hundred catechists, governed conciliarly, and overwhelmingly Japanese in its membership and its working clergy. By any reckoning it was the largest indigenous Orthodox community in Asia. The lived texture of these communities — how the scattered congregations actually met, worshipped, sang, and supported themselves — is the subject of the companion file (see The Life of the Communities). The institution Nicholas built would receive autonomy in 1970, the same year as his glorification (see Canonization and the Church Today).

The structure described in this file — conciliar in its government, Japanese in its clergy and laity, and pressed toward standing on its own feet — proved to be more than an achievement of Nicholas’s lifetime; it was, in retrospect, what allowed the Church to survive the catastrophe that followed it. Within a few years of his death the Russian Revolution of 1917 destroyed the institutions that had been the mission’s financial spine: the Holy Synod and the Orthodox Missionary Society that together had supplied the larger part of its funds could no longer send a rouble, and the Japanese Church was thrown abruptly onto exactly the self-support toward which Nicholas had been only partway moving. That it endured the shock at all owed much to the fact that its life was already carried by Japanese clergy and lay councils rather than by a Russian staff, and that its property had been vested in a society under Japanese law. The conciliar, increasingly self-supporting body Nicholas left behind was, in other words, structurally fitted to outlive its founder and the empire that had sponsored it — and that long survival ran on, through the upheavals of the twentieth century, to the grant of autonomy in 1970 by the Russian Church, the formal recognition of the maturity toward which the whole structure had tended (see Canonization and the Church Today).

References

Timeline of Orthodoxy in Japan. OrthodoxWiki (orthodoxwiki.org/Timeline_of_Orthodoxy_in_Japan). (The councils of 1874, 1875, 1882, and 1903; the ordinations of Sawabe and Sakai by Bishop Paul of Kamchatka.)
Puzanova (DPhil thesis, University of Oxford, 2020), ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:27bf3331-8744-4e53-b614-98ebf80b9532. (Collective decision-making, p. 194; the 105 signatories of 1888; catechists’ pay set in council, p. 197; the Church Property Society, p. 198; the 1909 half-and-half memorandum, pp. 196–97; the roubles figures, p. 178; the 1911 self-financing parishes, p. 201; the revisionist reading of Nicholas’s aims; the “slightly more than 34,000” figure citing Sablina.)
Barbara Lacey, St. Nikolai of Japan. Holy Trinity Orthodox Church, Connecticut (orthodoxct.org/files/Misc%20Documents/St-Nikolai-of-Japan.pdf). (Lay delegates from every congregation; the canonization-document statistics of 34,110 Christians, 34 priests and 8 deacons, 115 catechists, and the churches/chapels counts.)
Saint Nicholas, Enlightener of Japan. Orthodox Church in America (oca.org). (The 33,017 figure; 266 communities.)
St. Nicholas of Japan, Apostle to Japan (Monk Nicodemus Jones). OrthoChristian (orthochristian.com/51599.html). (“About 33,000”; 266 communities; 40 clergy; the 175 churches and 8 cathedrals figure.)
Nicholas of Japan. Wikipedia. (“About 33,000”; 266 communities.)
John Sanidopoulos, Saint Nicholas, Archbishop of Japan (+1912). johnsanidopoulos.com/2017/02/saint-nicholas-archbishop-of-japan-1912.html. (33,017 Christians; 266 communities; 35 priests and 6 deacons; 116 catechists.)
Fr. Edward Pehanich, The Apostle to Japan. ACROD (acrod.org/orthodox-christianity/articles/saints/st-nicholas-of-japan). (“Over 35,000” Christians; 265 communities; 32 priests; 96 churches and 265 chapels.)