Canonization and the Church Today

The glorification of St. Nicholas as Equal-to-the-Apostles by the Moscow Patriarchate on 10 April 1970 — the same act by which the Patriarchate granted autocephaly to the Orthodox Church in America and autonomy to the Church of Japan; his feast on 3/16 February; the autonomous Orthodox Church of Japan today, its three dioceses and its disputed but modest membership; and the legacy of an apostle whose method of enculturation made the once-secret community of three baptized in 1868 into a local Church that bears its founder among the saints.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox / Japanese (canonized 1970)

The Glorification (10 April 1970)

Fifty-eight years after his repose, Archbishop Nicholas was formally glorified — canonized — by the Moscow Patriarchate on 10 April 1970, under Patriarch Alexis I, with the title Holy Equal-to-the-Apostles Nicholas, Archbishop of Japan (Nicholas of Japan, OrthodoxWiki, orthodoxwiki.org/Nicholas_of_Japan; Saint Nicholas, Enlightener of Japan, OCA, “canonized on April 10, 1970”; orthodox.cn). The title is the heart of the matter. Equal-to-the-Apostles (Isapostolos) is one of the rarest honors the Orthodox Church confers, reserved for those whose work brought whole peoples to the faith — and so for Nicholas it is not a flourish but a precise description of what he did. He stands in a small company: with the Emperor Constantine and his mother Helen, with Mary Magdalene, with Vladimir of Kiev and Nina of Georgia, with Cyril and Methodius, the apostles of the Slavs — and with his own commissioner and model, St. Innocent (Veniaminov) of Alaska and Moscow, who had set him the task of learning the language and translating the services half a century before (see Arrival in Japan (1861)). To be numbered among the Equals-to-the-Apostles is to be ranked with the founders of national Churches; the Church judged that Nicholas had founded one.

The Package of 1970

The timing of the glorification is no coincidence, and it repays attention, because it places Nicholas inside one of the most consequential acts in modern Orthodox history. The canonization of 10 April 1970 was part of a single act of the Moscow Patriarchate by which the Patriarchate simultaneously granted autocephaly to the Orthodox Church in America (the OCA) and granted (or re-established) autonomy to the Orthodox Church of Japan (Orthodox Church in Japan, Wikipedia, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthodox_Church_in_Japan: “On 10 April 1970… the Moscow Patriarchate canonised Nikolay (Kassatkin) as part of a package deal of granting autocephaly to the OCA and re-establishing control over the Church of Japan as an autonomous church”).

The logic links two great missionary inheritances of the Russian Church on the Pacific rim. The American mission, planted from Alaska and traced back to St. Herman and St. Innocent, became in 1970 a self-governing autocephalous Church (see St. Herman of Alaska; on the Russian Church that granted it, St. Tikhon of Moscow, who had himself served in America). The Japanese mission, planted by Nicholas, became in the same act a self-governing autonomous Church under the Moscow Patriarchate — and its founder was canonized as the seal upon that grant. In one stroke the Patriarchate recognized the two daughter-Churches of its Pacific mission and raised the apostle of one of them to the altars (on the Russian tradition that sent and now released these missions, see Orthodoxy Guide: The Russian Orthodox Tradition).

The Feast Day

St. Nicholas of Japan is commemorated on 3 February (Old Style) / 16 February (New Style) — the day of his repose, kept as the day of his heavenly birth (Nicholas of Japan, OrthodoxWiki; orthodox.cn; OrthoChristian, “commemorated February 3/16”). The feast is kept not only in Japan and Russia but across the Orthodox world: the Russian, American (OCA), and Greek calendars all include him, so that the apostle of one nation is honored by the whole communion (on the structure of the Divine Liturgy at which he is commemorated, see Orthodoxy Guide: The Divine Liturgy).

The Church Today

The Church Nicholas founded survives, autonomous, under his name. It is the Orthodox Church of Japan — Nippon Harisutosu Seikyōkai, the “Japan Orthodox Church” — autonomous under the Moscow Patriarchate since the act of 1970, governed by a Metropolitan of All Japan seated at the Holy Resurrection Cathedral, the Nikolai-dō, on Surugadai in Tokyo, the same hill Nicholas secured in the 1870s (Orthodox Church of Japan, CNEWA, cnewa.org/eastern-christian-churches/orthodox-church/autonomous-churches/orthodox-church-of-japan/; Japanese Orthodox Church, Britannica, britannica.com/topic/Japanese-Orthodox-Church; see Nikolai-do, and on its place among the local Churches, Orthodoxy Guide: World Orthodoxy).

Its canonical structure today comprises three dioceses: the Archdiocese of Tokyo, the Eastern Diocese of Sendai, and the Western Diocese of Kyoto (CNEWA; Britannica). [Disputed: Wikipedia lists four sees, but this appears to miscount the canonical structure, which is three dioceses; three are presented here, with the variance noted.] The cathedral on Surugadai remains both the see of the Metropolitan and the symbolic heart of Japanese Orthodoxy, exactly as Nicholas intended when he built at the center of the capital rather than at its foreign edge (see The Move to Tokyo).

A Small and Disputed Membership

The Church remains small — a minority of a minority in a country where Christians of all confessions are a fraction of the population. Its size is genuinely disputed, and the disagreement is itself informative. [Disputed: the figures range widely. Britannica gives the older, traditional, maximal estimate of around 30,000; CNEWA (2014) gives around 10,000 adherents with 67 worshiping communities and 37 clergy; and Wikipedia, citing Japanese Ministry of Culture registration data for the end of 2021, gives 9,249 registered followers, 64 parishes, and 25 clergy.] (Britannica; CNEWA; Orthodox Church in Japan, Wikipedia.) Taken together, the sources point to a membership of roughly 9,000 to 30,000 — with the ~30,000 figure being the older, traditional one and the official 2021 registration giving around 9,000 — served by something on the order of sixty-four to sixty-seven parishes. The earlier claims of around 150 communities are not borne out by current data and are not repeated here. Whatever the exact count, the Church Nicholas founded continues to gather, to worship, and to ordain its own clergy a century after his death.

The Living Legacy

Nicholas is honored, in Japan and across the Orthodox world, as the apostle of Japan and as a model of Orthodox mission by enculturation — the conviction, learned from Innocent and carried out over half a century, that the missionary’s task is to give a people the faith in their own language and on their own terms, and so to found a Church that is genuinely theirs (see Asceticism and Method; An Indigenous Church). His translations of the Scriptures and the services are still used in the Japanese Church — though their deliberately classical, archaizing register, chosen to give the liturgy weight and dignity, has now itself become archaic to ordinary Japanese ears, and what to do about it is a living pastoral question rather than a settled one (see Language and Culture). The legacy is thus not a museum piece but an inheritance still being worked out.

His memory is kept at two places above all: his grave at Yanaka, where the Emperor’s leave allowed him to be buried within the city, and the cathedral on Surugadai that bears his name — both pilgrimage sites for Orthodox Christians and for Japanese honoring the founder of their Church (see Repose and Recognition; Nikolai-do). And his veneration is not confined to Japan: as one of the Equals-to-the-Apostles he is commemorated across the communion, his icon recognizable by the Japanese characters and the cross of his mission (on the wider Orthodox world that receives him, see Orthodoxy Guide: The Church and the World).

The Close of the Story

The arc is complete. The community Nicholas began was, in 1868, a secret of three men baptized at the risk of their lives in a northern port, under a ban that made their faith a capital crime (see Sawabe the Samurai; The First Community). A century and more later, that hidden seed has become an autonomous local Church of the Orthodox communion, with its own Metropolitan, its own dioceses, its own clergy, and its own cathedral in the capital of Japan — a Church that bears, among the saints it venerates, the Russian monk who gave his life to make it Japanese and then to make himself unnecessary to it. That is the measure of what Equal-to-the-Apostles means, and it is the whole of his story in a sentence: he came to a closed country as a foreigner, and he is remembered there as a father (on the founding pattern that made it possible, see Methodology for how these claims are sourced and weighed).

See Also

• Repose and Recognition — the death and burial that the glorification of 1970 confirmed
• An Indigenous Church — the self-governing Japanese Church that the 1970 autonomy formalized
• Language and Culture — Nicholas’s translations, still in use and now a living pastoral question
• Asceticism and Method — the enculturating method that is his enduring legacy
• St. Herman of Alaska — the American mission that, with Japan’s, was recognized in the single act of 1970
• Orthodoxy Guide: World Orthodoxy — the family of local and autonomous Churches the Church of Japan belongs to

References

• Nicholas of Japan. OrthodoxWiki (orthodoxwiki.org/Nicholas_of_Japan). (Glorification 10 April 1970; the title Equal-to-the-Apostles; the feast 3/16 February.)
• Saint Nicholas, Enlightener of Japan. Orthodox Church in America (oca.org/saints/lives/2026/02/03/100455-saint-nicholas-enlightener-of-japan), February 3. (“Canonized on April 10, 1970”; the Equal-to-the-Apostles honor.)
• Orthodox Church in Japan. Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthodox_Church_in_Japan). (The 10 April 1970 “package deal” of OCA autocephaly and Japanese autonomy with the canonization; 2021 registration data — 9,249 followers, 64 parishes, 25 clergy; the four-see count.)
• Orthodox Church of Japan. CNEWA (cnewa.org/eastern-christian-churches/orthodox-church/autonomous-churches/orthodox-church-of-japan/). (Autonomy under Moscow; the three dioceses of Tokyo, Sendai, and Kyoto; ~10,000 adherents, 67 communities, 37 clergy as of 2014.)
• Japanese Orthodox Church. Britannica (britannica.com/topic/Japanese-Orthodox-Church). (The autonomous Church; the older membership estimate of around 30,000.)
• St. Nicholas of Japan and feast notices. OrthoChristian.com. (Commemorated February 3/16.)
• Saint Nicholas Enlightener of Japan / orthodox.cn. (The feast 3/16 February; the title and glorification.)