The Life of the Communities

The everyday texture of the Japanese Orthodox Church under Nicholas: scattered congregations gathered by catechists, meeting first in homes and then in modest chapels; concentrated in the northeast around Sendai, in Hokkaido, and in Tokyo, but spreading south and west; carried week by week by a lay backbone of catechists and active believers, with priests circuiting among many communities; marked by a strong tradition of choral singing, by the women trained at Surugadai, and by a sense of belonging to a Japanese Church rather than a foreign enclave.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox / Japanese (canonized 1970)

A Scattered Church

The institutional Church described in the companion file — governed by councils, counted in the tens of thousands (see An Indigenous Church) — was, on the ground, a scattered thing: a network of small congregations spread thinly across a large country. The picture the sources give is of communities gathered by catechists, often meeting first in private homes and only later, as they grew and could afford it, in modest chapels of their own (Nicholas of Japan, OrthodoxWiki; Saint Nicholas of Japan, Equal-to-the-Apostles, mission2nihon; Puzanova, DPhil 2020).

Geographically the Church was concentrated in three regions. Its great stronghold was the northeast — the Tohoku region, around Sendai — together with Hokkaido, where the mission had begun at Hakodate, and the capital, Tokyo, where the center stood on Surugadai. From these the faith spread outward, with stations reaching south and west across the country (OrthodoxWiki; mission2nihon). The communities were not clustered in one place where a priest could reach them easily; they were distributed over hundreds of miles, and this single fact shaped everything about how they lived.

The Tohoku concentration was not accidental, and the standard accounts let one read something of its logic. The northeast was the country of the old Sendai and Aizu domains — territories that had stood on the losing side of the upheavals around the Meiji Restoration, and whose samurai class was left dislocated, impoverished, and estranged from the new order centered on the distant capital. Among such men, displaced from their inherited place in the world, Nicholas’s preaching found a hearing that it did not always find elsewhere, and the early growth of the Church ran along the lines of these northern domains and the families bound to them (mission2nihon; OrthodoxWiki; Puzanova, DPhil 2020). It is a recurring observation in the sources that the faith spread less by mass evangelism in the cities than by the slow planting of small congregations among such communities, region by region.

The mechanism of that planting is described with some consistency. A catechist would be sent or would settle in a town, gather a handful of inquirers, and begin to teach; the inquirers became a household of believers; the household-church met in a private home until it had grown enough, and could afford enough, to raise a chapel of its own. From a successful station the work might reach into neighboring villages, so that one catechist’s labor became in time a cluster of small communities (OrthodoxWiki; mission2nihon; Puzanova). The hundreds of communities counted at Nicholas’s death were thus not founded from the center by decree but grew up locally, one house-church at a time, around the catechists sent among the people.

The Backbone: Catechists and Laity

Because the communities were many and the priests were few, the weight of community life fell on the laity. The backbone of the Church was the catechist (kateketo) and the active lay believer. Catechists and committed laypeople taught, led services of readings, and evangelized, while the small body of priests circuited among many communities to serve the sacraments that only a priest can give (on the catechists as an institution see The Catechist System).

The arithmetic makes the point sharply. The roughly 266 communities of the Church at Nicholas’s death were served by only some 35 to 40 priests (the figures vary by source: see An Indigenous Church). Even setting aside the distances, that ratio means that most communities saw a priest only periodically — for the Liturgy, baptisms, and the great feasts, when the circuit brought him round — while the catechist and the lay believers carried the weekly life of the congregation between his visits. The Divine Liturgy itself required the priest (see Orthodoxy Guide: The Divine Liturgy), but the prayer, the teaching, the reading-services, and the holding-together of the community were the work of the people themselves. This was not a clericalized Church; it could not be.

It is worth dwelling on what the weekly rhythm of such a community actually was, because it differs sharply from the picture of parish life familiar in lands where a resident priest serves a single congregation. In the ordinary Japanese Orthodox community the priest was a visitor on a circuit, not a fixture. When he came, the community kept the great sacramental services that only he could give — above all the Divine Liturgy, with the Eucharist, and the baptisms, weddings, and confessions that had accumulated against his coming (on the Liturgy and its requirement of the priest see Orthodoxy Guide: The Divine Liturgy). Between those visits — which might be weeks or longer apart — the community did not fall silent. It continued to gather for the services a layman may lead: the reader-services of the daily and Sunday cycle, the hours, the typika, vespers and matins sung without a priest, together with the teaching that was the catechist’s special charge. The whole architecture of the catechist system presupposed exactly this: a literate, catechized laity able to sustain the round of prayer and instruction on its own, with the priest supplying the sacraments on his circuit. The result was a Church in which ordinary believers carried far more of the weekly burden of worship than they would in a more clericalized setting.

And what they sang and read in those gatherings was the worship of the Orthodox Church rendered into a dignified classical Japanese — the elevated liturgical register into which Nicholas and his collaborators had translated the services over decades of evenings (see Language and Culture). This is no small point for the texture of community life. Because the texts existed, a congregation gathered in a Tohoku chapel without its priest could still pray the Church’s services in its own tongue, sung by its own people; the labor of translation reached its purpose not in the study but here, in the mouths of the faithful keeping the round of worship between a priest’s visits.

Women’s Work

Women were central to the life of these communities, and the sources locate the root of that centrality at Surugadai. The women’s / girls’ school, operating from late 1875, trained Japanese women who went out to become teachers, the wives of catechists, choir members, and leaders of women’s activity in the parishes (OrthodoxWiki; mission2nihon). Through them the formation given at the Tokyo center reached the scattered congregations: a catechist sent to a distant station often went with a wife trained at Surugadai, and the women’s work in a parish — teaching, choir, the care of the community — was frequently led by women who had passed through that school. The sources present women as central to parish life; this file frames the claim as theirs, grounded in the existence and purpose of the Surugadai school rather than in any one anecdote.

The figure of the catechist’s wife deserves particular notice, because she stood at the meeting-point of the school and the scattered Church. A graduate of Surugadai who married a catechist did not simply accompany her husband to his station; she became, in effect, a second worker there — instructing the women and children, leading or strengthening the singing, and tending the network of relationships that held a small congregation together in a town where Christianity was regarded with suspicion. In a community that saw a priest only occasionally and depended for its weekly life on its resident teachers, the presence of such a trained woman alongside the catechist roughly doubled the formative reach of a station. The sources also record a wider sphere of charitable and educational work carried by the women of the Church — the care of the poor and the sick, the teaching of girls, the ordinary diaconal labor of a Christian community — through which the women’s activity became one of the channels by which Orthodoxy commended itself to a wary society (OrthodoxWiki; mission2nihon; Puzanova). The female backbone of the parishes was, on this account, not an auxiliary to the Church’s life but a structural part of it.

Choirs and Singing

One of the most striking features of the Japanese Church was the strength of its choral singing. Orthodox worship is sung throughout, and the Japanese took to it with notable seriousness. The 1911 figures include fourteen singing or choir instructors as a distinct category of church worker (OrthodoxWiki / Sanidopoulos) — a sign of how deliberately singing was cultivated. The choir of the Tokyo cathedral became notable in its own right, and the scale of the singing tradition is suggested by the two-hundred-member student choir that ACROD records as singing at Nicholas’s funeral (ACROD / Pehanich).

What the choirs sang was Orthodox worship rendered into classical Japanese — the dignified liturgical register into which Nicholas and his collaborators had translated the services over decades (see Language and Culture). The texts that had cost so many years of labor were not left on the page; they were sung, week by week, by Japanese choirs in Japanese churches. The choral life is one of the clearest marks that this was a Church inhabiting its own language and not merely reciting a foreign one.

Self-Support in Practice

The drive toward self-financing that Nicholas pursued at the institutional level (see An Indigenous Church) had its counterpart in the daily life of the communities. The picture the sources give is of congregations increasingly contributing to their own upkeep — to the building and maintenance of their chapels and, importantly, to the support of the catechists who served them (Puzanova; OrthodoxWiki). Since the catechists were the engine of the whole work, and since their pay was a standing item before the councils, a community that helped support its own catechist was taking on a real share of the Church’s burden. This was the parish-level reality behind the financial plans adopted in council: not an abstraction in a ledger but local believers putting their own money toward the workers who taught them.

The communities had a particular social character. A notable number of believers came from former-samurai (shizoku) families — the class dislocated by the Meiji settlement, among whom Christianity, including Nicholas’s, found early purchase (mission2nihon; the pattern is set in Sawabe the Samurai, the swordsman who became the first priest). The congregations the sources describe were tight, disciplined, and conscious of belonging to a Japanese Church — not a foreign colony planted on Japanese soil but a community of Japanese Christians.

That self-understanding was tested constantly. Throughout the Meiji period Christianity was widely regarded as foreign and suspect, and the Orthodox faced the social cost of that suspicion (see The Church in the Meiji Era). The hardest test came with the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05, when belonging to a Church founded by a Russian and funded from Russia exposed believers to the charge of disloyalty in wartime. They came through it as a Japanese Church — praying for their own country’s forces while their Russian-born archbishop withdrew from public services so that they might do so without contradiction (see Staying With His Flock). That the communities survived the war intact, and as Japanese, is among the strongest evidences of the character the sources attribute to them.

The Diaries as a Window

Much of what can be said about the inner life of these communities comes, directly or at a remove, from Nicholas’s own diaries, which he kept for decades and which record among much else his pastoral visitations to the scattered congregations (the Diaries, as drawn on by Puzanova and the standard accounts; on the diaries as a source see The Diaries). When the founder himself traveled — and he did travel widely among the communities — he set down what he found: the state of a given congregation, the quality and diligence of its catechist, the progress or backsliding of its believers, the practical problems of money, buildings, and discipline that beset a small church in a hostile society. These notes are frank rather than hagiographical; the sources that draw on them present a Nicholas who recorded the weaknesses of communities and workers as readily as their strengths, and who measured each station against the standard of what an Orthodox congregation ought to be.

For the historian of community life this frankness is precisely the value. Because Nicholas wrote not for edification but for himself, the diaries preserve the unglamorous texture that devotional accounts smooth away — the congregation whose numbers had slipped, the catechist who had grown slack, the believers tried by poverty or social pressure, alongside the communities that flourished. The standard accounts agree that the diaries are the closest window available onto the everyday condition of the Japanese communities, seen through the eyes of the one man who knew them all and visited as many as he could (Puzanova; on the document itself see The Diaries). They are the reason the picture in this file can claim to be of a real Church and not an idealized one.

The Annual Rhythm

For all their scattering, the communities were not isolated fragments. They were knit into one body by the rhythm of the councils. Catechists and lay delegates gathered at the general councils; reports flowed in from across the country; assignments were made and budgets were set; and the far-flung congregations were bound together around Nicholas and the Surugadai center (Puzanova; OrthodoxWiki; on Surugadai as the heart of the Church see Nikolai-do). A catechist in a Tohoku village or a Hokkaido town was not merely a local figure; he was a worker of a national Church whose assignment had been settled in council and whose community’s life was reported back to the center.

This is the human face of the institution described next door. The councils and statistics of An Indigenous Church are the skeleton; the homes-become-chapels, the circuiting priests, the women trained at Surugadai, the choirs singing the classical-Japanese services, the former-samurai families holding firm under suspicion and through a war — these are the flesh. Together they are the picture the sources give of a real Church, Japanese in its people and its language, living its everyday life across the islands in the last decades of Nicholas’s life.

References

Nicholas of Japan. OrthodoxWiki (orthodoxwiki.org/Nicholas_of_Japan). (The catechist-gathered, home-to-chapel communities; the regional concentration; the women’s school from 1875; the singing instructors; self-support.)
Saint Nicholas of Japan, Equal-to-the-Apostles. mission2nihon (mission2nihon.substack.com). (The texture of community life; the women’s work; the shizoku background of many believers.)
Puzanova (DPhil thesis, University of Oxford, 2020), ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:27bf3331-8744-4e53-b614-98ebf80b9532. (The scattered communities and their self-support; the councils into which they were gathered; reports, assignments, and budgets.)
John Sanidopoulos, Saint Nicholas, Archbishop of Japan (+1912). johnsanidopoulos.com/2017/02/saint-nicholas-archbishop-of-japan-1912.html. (The 1911 figures, including the fourteen singing/choir instructors; 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). (The two-hundred-member student choir at the funeral.)