The Diaries

For more than forty years St. Nicholas kept a personal diary in Russian — the single most important primary source for his mission and a rare intimate record of Meiji Japan seen from within. Candid to the point of severity, sparing neither himself nor others, it was the book to which he entrusted his soul. Believed by the popular tradition to have perished in the Great Kanto earthquake of 1923, it was in fact preserved in Soviet archives and recovered for scholarship by the Japanese specialist Kennosuke Nakamura a century after it was begun.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox / Japanese (canonized 1970)

What They Are

From 1870 until near the end of his life, Nicholas wrote a personal diary — in Russian, the dnevniki — recording the daily business of the mission and the movements of his own mind (Olga Puzanova, The Russian Orthodox Mission in Japan, DPhil thesis, University of Oxford, 2020, https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:27bf3331-8744-4e53-b614-98ebf80b9532 ). They are, in Puzanova’s description, “the most sincere and detailed account of his work,” the book to which “he entrusted his soul” and gave “an honest account of his life and work” (Puzanova, DPhil 2020). The diary was not kept for publication and not written in the register of edification. It was a working journal and a private confidant, and that is exactly what gives it its value: it is the one source that lets us see the mission of arrival at Hakodate and the building of the Tokyo Church from the inside, day by day, in the words of the man who made it.

For the historian, the diary is therefore the single most important primary source for the Russian Orthodox mission in Japan — and, beyond that, an unusually intimate outsider’s account of Meiji society in the decades of its transformation (Puzanova, DPhil 2020; St. Nicholas of Japan, OrthoChristian, https://orthochristian.com/151103.html ). A foreign churchman who lived in Japan for half a century, learned the language and the religions thoroughly (see Asceticism and Method), and wrote down what he saw nearly every day has left a record that few other foreign residents of the period can rival for length, continuity, or candor.

It is worth dwelling on what that breadth makes possible. The diary spans, almost without interruption, the years from the early 1870s to the eve of 1912 — that is, the whole arc of the Meiji era, from the consolidation of the new imperial government through the constitutional settlement of 1889, the Sino-Japanese War, the rapid industrialization of the cities, and the Russo-Japanese War. Nicholas wrote not as a tourist or a short-term consul but as a permanent resident who travelled the country to visit its congregations, read its newspapers, conversed with its officials and its priests of other religions, and registered the temper of its public life. The same pages that record a catechist’s appointment or a parish quarrel also record the price of rice, the mood of a provincial town, the rumour and feeling that surrounded a war. For this reason the dnevniki have become a source not only for Church historians but for social and political historians of Meiji Japan, who read them as the testimony of an acute and long-resident observer with no stake in flattering either his hosts or his homeland. Modern scholarship on the mission — Kennosuke Nakamura’s editions, Olga Puzanova’s Oxford thesis, the studies of Betsy Perabo and others — builds directly upon this single body of text, so that the historiography of Japanese Orthodoxy is, to an unusual degree, the historiography of one man’s journal (Puzanova, DPhil 2020).

Their Character

The diaries are frank to the point of severity. Nicholas recorded daily mission work, but also blunt, sometimes harsh assessments of the people and events around him — of Japanese co-workers and Russian officials, of converts and critics, of the politics and religion of the country he had adopted (Puzanova, DPhil 2020; OrthoChristian 151103). He did not spare himself. The book is full of his loneliness, his discouragements, his struggles and his hopes, set down without the smoothing that a memoir or an official report would have given them. It is the antithesis of pious self-presentation: a candid record rather than a constructed image of sanctity.

That candor is itself part of his spiritual character. The man who in public attributed every fruit of the mission to God and to his Japanese helpers (see Asceticism and Method) wrote in private without flattering himself — and the diary’s unsparing honesty about his own failings is the inner side of that humility. A few entries, in the devotional translations now circulating in English, give the voice. From the years of the Russo-Japanese War, when he stayed at his post in an enemy capital while his homeland and his flock were at war (see Staying With His Flock), comes the often-quoted cry of isolation: “the fire rages on deep inside my heart. There is not a single soul with whom I can share thoughts…” (devotional translation, from the Nakamura/Hyperion diaries, via OrthoChristian 151103). And the self-deprecation that runs through the whole work surfaces in his estimate of his own life’s reach — that he could “see that I am of use only to Japan, to an insignificant corner of the world” (devotional translation, from diary entries via mission2nihon). The second of these is not despair but the diary’s characteristic note: a man measuring himself small, and giving himself wholly to one people for it.

These two utterances, read together, open onto the deeper texture of the diary voice. The war-years cry is the keenest expression of a loneliness that was structural and lifelong: for most of his half-century in Japan, Nicholas was the one Russian among the Japanese — a bishop without a brother-bishop near him, a Russian priest in a country that had only recently opened, surrounded by helpers he had himself formed but who could not be, in the nature of things, his peers in language, memory, or homeland. The diary became his interlocutor precisely because there was, as he wrote, no single soul with whom he could share his thoughts. Alongside that isolation runs a steady current of frustration: with the slowness of the mission’s progress, with the recurring shortfalls of money and men, and — recorded with the same bluntness he turned on himself — with co-workers, Japanese and Russian alike, whose failings he set down without softening. He could be impatient, severe, and discouraged on the page in ways the public Life never shows. Yet the same diary that registers all this is also a long record of love for Japan and for the Japanese: the man who reckoned himself “of use only to Japan” meant the phrase as a vow, not a complaint, and the journal documents the deliberate self-narrowing by which a Russian monk made one foreign people the whole object of his life. The candor, the frustration, the loneliness, and the love are not separable strands; they are the single voice of a man writing honestly to himself across forty years, and it is this voice — not the smoothed figure of the hagiographies — that the recovered diaries restore (Puzanova, DPhil 2020; OrthoChristian 151103).

Loss and Rediscovery

The story of how the diaries came down to us is told in two registers, and both deserve a hearing.

The popular, hagiographic account is dramatic and widely repeated: the diaries were believed to have been burned and lost in the Great Kanto earthquake of 1 September 1923 — the disaster that wrecked Tokyo and devastated the Surugadai cathedral itself (see Nikolai-do) — and were only afterward, against expectation, rediscovered. This is the framing one meets in the standard reference accounts: the diary was “believed to have been burned and lost in [the] Great Kanto earthquake… but rediscovered by Kennosuke Nakamura” (Nicholas of Japan, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_of_Japan ).

The scholarly account, given most precisely by Puzanova, is less miraculous and more exact. The manuscripts were not in fact destroyed: they were preserved in Soviet archives — in Leningrad — and their existence was known to specialists. What changed was not their survival but their study. The Japanese scholar Kennosuke Nakamura (中村健之介) was the first to take up the diaries systematically and to make them the basis of serious research; Puzanova dates Nakamura’s work in the Leningrad archives to around 1979 (Puzanova, DPhil 2020). The honest synthesis is that the popular “burned-and-found” story telescopes a real institutional fact — the manuscripts spent decades in Russian state custody, far from Tokyo, effectively lost to the Japanese Church — into a single legend of fire and recovery. The earthquake did destroy a great deal at Surugadai; the diaries were elsewhere, and survived. Per the methodology of this collection, both framings are recorded rather than harmonized away (see Methodology).

The Publication

It was Nakamura who turned the surviving manuscripts into a published source. Kennosuke Nakamura (中村健之介) came to the diaries not as a Church historian but as a scholar of Russian literature, and it was the philologist’s patience for a long, difficult Russian text that the task required. Reading and ordering the manuscripts, deciphering Nicholas’s hand, dating and annotating decades of entries written in a private register never meant for print — this was the labour of years, and Nakamura gave much of his scholarly life to it. The magnitude of the result is itself part of the diary’s significance: he edited the surviving journals and brought them out as Dnevniki svjatitelja Nikolaja Japonskogo [Diaries of St. Nicholas of Japan], in five volumes, St. Petersburg: Giperion (Hyperion), 2004 (Nicholas of Japan, Wikipedia; OrthoChristian 151103; obitel-minsk, which cites “Vol. 1, St Petersburg: Hyperion, 2004”). A five-volume critical edition is no small monument, and its appearance — in Russian, in Russia — restored to the scholarly world a primary source that had effectively been out of reach for the better part of a century. Nakamura then carried the work back to where its subject’s heart had been: he prepared a Japanese translation with commentary, published in Tokyo by Kyobunkan in 2007, so that the Japanese Church and the Japanese reading public could at last read, in their own language, the inner record of the man who had founded their Church (Nicholas of Japan, Wikipedia). The two editions together — the Russian scholarly text of 2004 and the Japanese translation of 2007 — are the foundation on which every modern study of the mission now rests.

There is, as yet, no complete English edition. English-language readers reach the diaries only through excerpts, and those excerpts come to them already mediated by devotional translation — quoted in articles, sermons, and online collections rather than in a critical edition (OrthoChristian 151103). An English diary-translation effort is underway online, where individual entries are being published a few at a time (mission2nihon), a sign that the diaries are still, slowly, being opened to non-Russian readers even now. This collection therefore treats every diary quotation with the caution the methodology requires: the words an English reader meets are translations of translations, and are marked here as devotional translations wherever they are quoted (see Methodology).

It is worth being explicit about why this matters, and not merely as a scholarly scruple. The methodology of this collection insists on distinguishing what a source actually says from what later piety has made of it, and on naming the layers of mediation between a primary document and the reader (see Methodology). The diaries are the textbook case. The Russian original exists in a critical edition; but the English reader almost never meets that text. What reaches English is a chain: Nicholas’s nineteenth-century Russian, edited and printed by Nakamura, then rendered into English by a translator working for devotional rather than scholarly purposes, and finally quoted — often at a further remove — in an article or a sermon. At each link something can shift: a connotation, an emphasis, the line between paraphrase and quotation. This is why the entries cited above are flagged as devotional translations and not presented as the saint’s exact English words; the honest position is that, until a complete and critical English edition exists, every English diary quotation must be received as a faithful gesture toward the original rather than the original itself. To say so is not to disparage the translators who have made these passages available — it is to keep faith with the document by refusing to claim more precision than the present state of translation allows.

Why They Matter

The diaries are the reason this collection can speak about Nicholas’s inner life at all. The modern reconstruction of his mind and mission — Nakamura’s editions, Puzanova’s revisionist scholarship (see Asceticism and Method), the work of historians such as James Stamoolis and Betsy Perabo — rests on the existence of this one long, honest book. Without it we would have the public Life: the convert-samurai, the cathedral, the wartime conduct, the canonization. With it we have the man behind the Life — discouraged, lonely, severe, self-forgetting, and bound by love to a single people in “an insignificant corner of the world.”

That is finally what the diary is: a monument both of mission history and of the Russian–Japanese cultural encounter, written one day at a time across forty years, lost to its own Church for the better part of a century, and given back to scholarship and to the faithful only in our own time. It is the document that makes the asceticism and method of St. Nicholas legible from the inside, and it stands behind every other page of his story.

References

Puzanova, Olga. The Russian Orthodox Mission in Japan (DPhil thesis). University of Oxford, 2020. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:27bf3331-8744-4e53-b614-98ebf80b9532 . (The diaries from 1870; “the most sincere and detailed account of his work,” to which “he entrusted his soul… an honest account of his life and work”; the diaries preserved in Leningrad archives; Nakamura’s systematic study dated to ~1979.)
Nicholas of Japan. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_of_Japan . (The diary “believed to have been burned and lost in [the] Great Kanto earthquake… but rediscovered by Kennosuke Nakamura”; Nakamura’s five-volume Hyperion edition, 2004; the Japanese translation, Kyobunkan, 2007.)
St. Nicholas of Japan. OrthoChristian.com. https://orthochristian.com/151103.html . (The diaries’ candor; the devotional-translation war-years entry, “the fire rages on deep inside my heart…”; English access via excerpt only.)
The Life of Equal-to-the-Apostles Nicholai, Archbishop of Japan. Saint Elisabeth Convent (obitel-minsk.org). (Citing “Vol. 1, St Petersburg: Hyperion, 2004.”)
Saint Nicholas of Japan, Equal-to-the-Apostles. mission2nihon (mission2nihon.substack.com). (Devotional translation of diary entries, including “I am of use only to Japan, to an insignificant corner of the world”; the ongoing online English translation effort.)