Asceticism and Method

St. Nicholas joined a rigorous personal asceticism — fourteen-hour days of study, four hours of translation every evening for thirty years, decades in two small rooms in patched clothes — to a deliberate missionary method: vernacular translation, native clergy and catechists, deep enculturation, political non-entanglement, and patience over decades. Scholars treat him as a paradigm of Orthodox mission in the indigenizing tradition of St. Innocent of Alaska. Beneath the method lay something simpler: a man who gave his whole life to one people.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox / Japanese (canonized 1970)

Ascetic Discipline

Nicholas lived as a monk, and the monastic rigor never relaxed across half a century in Japan. The first years were given almost wholly to study. For seven or eight years after his arrival he worked at the Japanese language, history, and religion fourteen hours a day (St. Nicholas of Japan (Monk Nicodemus Jones), OrthoChristian, https://orthochristian.com/51599.html — “fourteen hours a day over the course of seven years”; the Life at obitel-minsk gives “eight full years, working fourteen hours a day”). This was not idle scholarship but the foundation of everything that followed — the immersion he had been counseled to undertake at Hakodate (see Arrival in Japan (1861)).

The discipline of the study years became the rhythm of his whole life. For thirty years he translated every evening from six to ten o’clock — four hours nightly, working, as the accounts have it, “one verse at a time” (Fr. Edward Pehanich, The Apostle to Japan, ACROD, https://www.acrod.org/orthodox-christianity/articles/saints/st-nicholas-of-japan ). He rose around six in the morning and worked until nearly one at night; he lived for decades in two small rooms, wore patched clothes, and ate sparingly (ACROD; Equal-to-the-Apostles St. Nicholas of Japan, St. John the Baptist Cathedral, Washington DC, https://stjohndc.org/en/orthodoxy-foundation/saints/equal-apostles-st-nicholas-japan ). The translation labor that produced the Japanese Scriptures and liturgy was itself an ascetic discipline, sustained nightly across three decades.

Humility

The self-image that runs through his own words is deliberately small. “I am nothing more than a matchstick with which a candle is lit,” he said of himself (quoted by Monk Nicodemus Jones, OrthoChristian 51599). He attributed the fruit of the mission not to himself but to God and to his Japanese co-workers, and the candor of his diaries about his own failings is the private face of the same humility (see The Diaries). The man who organized one of the most successful Orthodox missions of the modern era insisted that the success was not his — that he was the match, not the flame.

The Missionary Method

If the asceticism was the man’s foundation, the method was his work — and it is the method that has made him a textbook case in Orthodox missiology. It has five strands, and they hold together.

(a) Translation as the core. “Translation is the core of missionary work,” Nicholas held (verified quote, OrthoChristian) — and his thirty years of nightly labor were the practice of that conviction. The principle was not original to him; he inherited it directly from St. Innocent (Veniaminov), the apostle to Alaska, who at their Nikolaevsk meeting had charged the young hieromonk to master the language and translate the Scriptures and services into it (see Arrival in Japan (1861)). The Japanese mission thus carried into the Far East the program already proven on the American frontier, the Pacific Orthodox precedent that descends from the first Alaskan mission (see St. Herman of Alaska).

(b) Native clergy and catechists. From the very first fruits of the mission, Nicholas set Japanese to evangelize Japanese. The convert-samurai Sawabe and his companions became evangelists almost as soon as they were converts (see Sawabe the Samurai), and the lay catechist became the engine of the whole enterprise (see The Catechist System). Traveling catechists founded over 250 missions across the country, the network of stations that carried the faith far beyond what a handful of Russian priests could ever have reached (OrthoChristian 51599). The Church was to be staffed, from the bottom up, by the Japanese themselves.

(c) Enculturation. The method rested on the deep, sympathetic study of Japanese language, history, and the three great traditions of the country — Buddhism, Confucianism, and Shinto. Nicholas approached them not as errors to be refuted but as a world to be understood, and the aim was a faith made genuinely Japanese, prayed in Japanese (see Language and Culture). The fourteen-hour study years were the price of this; the indigenous Church was the product.

(d) Non-political. Nicholas kept the Church clear of Russian state interests. The mission was not an arm of the embassy, and the converts were not made into partisans of Russia. The proof came in the Russo-Japanese War, when the Japanese Church — founded by a Russian, in the enemy’s capital — held together and prayed for the Japanese army, while its founder stayed at his post but withdrew from public liturgical prayer for victory (see Staying With His Flock). The political detachment that looked like prudence in peacetime proved, in war, to be the thing that saved the mission.

(e) Patience. Above all the method was slow. “Fr. Nicholas was in no hurry to baptize” (St. John the Baptist Cathedral, DC); he cared more for the depth of a conversion than for the count of them. It was nearly thirty years before he was convinced that the mission had taken real and lasting root (obitel-minsk). The catechumenate was long, the standard high, and the numbers were never the point. A Church grown this slowly would, he judged, stand.

Scholarly Assessment

Modern missiology has taken Nicholas as a paradigm of Orthodox mission method. James Stamoolis, in Eastern Orthodox Mission Theology Today (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1986), treats him at pp. 35–40 as a model case — catechist-station evangelization joined to vernacular translation — placed squarely in the indigenizing tradition that descends from St. Innocent and from the Kazan / Ilminsky vernacular method of the Russian Church (Stamoolis, pp. 35–40; the thesis is located there, though no verbatim text was retrievable online — the page range and his argument are cited, not a quotation). Stamoolis’s reading is the standard one: Nicholas did, in Japan, what Orthodox mission theory holds a mission ought to do.

A revisionist nuance comes from Olga Puzanova (DPhil, Oxford, 2020). She argues that Nicholas’s indigenizing was not only a principle but in part a necessity — that the reliance on Japanese clergy and catechists was forced, to a real degree, by the chronic scarcity of Russian personnel and money (see An Indigenous Church). This is offered here as a scholarly counter-reading rather than a contradiction: the method may have been both a conviction Nicholas held and a constraint he turned to advantage. The indigenous Church was, on Puzanova’s account, partly a virtue made of necessity — which does nothing to diminish that it worked.

Love for Japan

Beneath the method lay something that was not a technique at all. The diaries show a man who gave his entire life to one people and came, over fifty years, to belong to them — who could write that he was “of use only to Japan, to an insignificant corner of the world” (devotional translation, via mission2nihon; see The Diaries) and mean it not as defeat but as vocation. This is the spiritual root from which the whole method grows. The translation, the catechists, the patience, the enculturation are all expressions of a prior self-giving love — not a strategy for winning a people but the gift of a life to them. The Japanese honored him in return, and at his repose the Emperor himself granted him a place of burial (see Repose and Recognition). The match had lit its candle, and the light was Japanese.

See Also

References

  • St. Nicholas of Japan, Apostle to Japan (Monk Nicodemus Jones). OrthoChristian.com. https://orthochristian.com/51599.html . (“Fourteen hours a day over the course of seven years”; “I am nothing more than a matchstick with which a candle is lit”; “Translation is the core of missionary work”; over 250 missions founded by traveling catechists.)
  • The Apostle to Japan (Fr. Edward Pehanich). ACROD (acrod.org). https://www.acrod.org/orthodox-christianity/articles/saints/st-nicholas-of-japan . (Thirty years of translation every evening, 6:00–10:00 p.m., “one verse at a time”; the daily rule of life.)
  • Equal-to-the-Apostles St. Nicholas of Japan. St. John the Baptist Cathedral, Washington, DC (stjohndc.org). https://stjohndc.org/en/orthodoxy-foundation/saints/equal-apostles-st-nicholas-japan . (The two small rooms, patched clothes, sparse meals; “Fr. Nicholas was in no hurry to baptize.”)
  • The Life of Equal-to-the-Apostles Nicholai, Archbishop of Japan. Saint Elisabeth Convent (obitel-minsk.org). (“Eight full years, working fourteen hours a day”; nearly thirty years before he was convinced of real success.)
  • Stamoolis, James J. Eastern Orthodox Mission Theology Today. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1986, pp. 35–40. (Nicholas as a paradigm of Orthodox mission method — catechist-station evangelization plus vernacular translation — in the indigenizing tradition of Innocent and the Kazan/Ilminsky method.)
  • Puzanova, Olga. The Russian Orthodox Mission in Japan (DPhil thesis). University of Oxford, 2020. (The revisionist reading: indigenization partly forced by scarce Russian personnel and money.)
  • Saint Nicholas of Japan, Equal-to-the-Apostles. mission2nihon (mission2nihon.substack.com). (Devotional translation of the diary phrase “of use only to Japan, to an insignificant corner of the world.”)