Repose and Recognition

The last years of the apostle of Japan: the elevation to archbishop after the Russo-Japanese War; his repose at Tokyo on 3/16 February 1912, in the same year the Meiji era closed; the rare honors paid him by the Japanese state — a funeral wreath from the Emperor himself and personal imperial permission to be buried within the city; the vast funeral that was called the largest ever given a foreigner in Japan; and his burial at Yanaka, where his grave became a place of veneration.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox / Japanese (canonized 1970)

Archbishop of Tokyo and All Japan

By the close of the Russo-Japanese War, Nicholas had become one of the most respected foreigners in Japan — a Russian who had refused to leave his Japanese flock while Russia and Japan were at war, and who had ministered to the Russian prisoners held on Japanese soil without ever ceasing to be the father of the Japanese Church (see Staying With His Flock; Ministry to Prisoners). In recognition, in part, of that conduct, he was raised to the rank of archbishop, with the title Archbishop of Tokyo and All Japan, and an independent Diocese of Japan was formally constituted around the see at Surugadai. [Disputed: the OCA dates the elevation to 24 March 1906, while Wikipedia and the Timeline of Orthodoxy in Japan (OrthodoxWiki) give 1907 and date the formal erection of an independent Diocese of Japan to that year; the likeliest reconciliation is that 1906 marks the elevation to the archiepiscopal rank and 1907 the formal constitution of the diocese — both are presented here.] (Saint Nicholas, Enlightener of Japan, OCA; Nicholas of Japan, Wikipedia; the fuller treatment of the title is in The Move to Tokyo.)

The elevation set the seal on a life’s work. The young hieromonk who had arrived at Hakodate in 1861 to a country where his faith was a capital crime now governed, as archbishop, a national Church with a cathedral in the capital, a native clergy, and communities scattered across the islands (see An Indigenous Church). Past seventy and worn by decades of fourteen-hour days, he continued to govern and to translate to the very end of his life (see The Diaries).

The Repose (3/16 February 1912)

Archbishop Nicholas reposed at Tokyo on 3 February (Old Style) / 16 February (New Style) 1912 (orthodox.cn, which gives “February 3/16, 1912”; Nicholas of Japan, Wikipedia; Enlightener of Japan: Blessed Nicholas Kasatkin, ROCA / Orthodox America, which records the time as 7:15 a.m.). [Disputed: his age at death. Born 1 August 1836 and dying in February 1912, he was chronologically seventy-five (Wikipedia; OrthodoxWiki); the OCA states “at the age of seventy-six,” counting the year he was then living. Seventy-five is the simple arithmetic figure, with the OCA’s seventy-six noted.] He had spent fifty years in Japan, almost the whole of his adult life, and had left the country only twice — both times to serve the mission.

There is a quiet historical symmetry in the date. 1912 was also the year the Emperor Meiji died — the Meiji Emperor reposed later that same year, closing the era that had opened Japan, lifted the ban on Christianity in 1873, and framed the whole of Nicholas’s public ministry (on the lifting of the ban see The Move to Tokyo). The apostle of Japan and the emperor under whom his Church had grown passed within months of each other, and the era they had shared ended with them.

The Honor of the Japanese State

What followed was extraordinary, and it must be stated precisely, because the precision is the point. A Russian Orthodox archbishop, a foreigner and a missionary, was honored at his death by the Japanese imperial state in ways rarely accorded to any foreigner — and the documented honors, sober and specific, say more than any embellishment could.

First, the Emperor Meiji sent a funeral wreath of fresh flowers, inscribed with characters rendered “On-Shi” — “the highest gift,” or the imperial gift. The sending of such a wreath by the Emperor’s own hand was an honor “rarely accorded” to a foreigner, and its arrival at an Orthodox archbishop’s funeral was remarked upon at the time as a signal mark of esteem (The Life of Equal-to-the-Apostles Nicholai, Archbishop of Japan, obitel-minsk; Saint Nicholas of Japan, Equal-to-the-Apostles, mission2nihon; ROCA / Orthodox America).

Second — and still more telling — the Emperor Meiji personally gave permission for Nicholas to be buried within the city, at the Yanaka cemetery (Saint Nicholas, Enlightener of Japan, OCA, which states that “the Japanese Emperor Meiji personally gave permission for him to be buried within the city, at the Yanaka cemetery”). Burial inside Tokyo was not a matter of course for a foreigner, and the granting of it by the Emperor in person was a notable distinction, an acknowledgment that this Russian belonged to the city he had served.

It is worth stating plainly what is not recorded. Despite later embellishments, no reliable source attests that Nicholas received the Order of the Rising Sun or any Japanese decoration of state; the claim is unsupported and is omitted here. The documented honors — the imperial wreath and the imperial permission for burial within the city — are striking enough, and they are the more credible for being modest. To overclaim would be to obscure what is genuinely remarkable: that the Meiji state, which had only ceased to persecute Christianity within Nicholas’s own lifetime, marked the death of a Christian missionary with gestures from the throne.

The Funeral

The funeral itself was on a scale without precedent for a foreigner in Japan. It was described as the largest funeral ever given a foreigner in the country (ROCA / Orthodox America). The funeral procession reportedly stretched for kilometers through Tokyo — one account gives a length of roughly ten kilometers (mission2nihon) — and a great student choir, numbering around two hundred voices, sang the Orthodox funeral hymns in Japanese (The Apostle to Japan, ACROD). The mourners were Japanese: not only the Orthodox faithful whom Nicholas had gathered and catechized over half a century, but crowds of non-Christian Japanese who had come to honor a man the city had taken as its own.

It would be false to attach a hard headcount to that crowd — no source gives a firm number, and the figures that circulate are estimates rather than counts. What the sources jointly attest is the scale: the largest such funeral the country had seen for a foreigner, the long procession through the streets of Tokyo, the great mixed crowds of Christians and non-Christians, and the funeral office sung in the language of the people to whom Nicholas had given the Scriptures and the services in their own tongue (see The Japanese Scriptures and Liturgy). The qualitative picture is consistent and well-attested even where the numbers are not.

That the mourners were so many, and so largely Japanese, is itself the measure of what Nicholas had built. A Russian had died in Tokyo, and Tokyo grieved him as one of its own — the recognition itself a measure of how Japanese his Church had become (see Staying With His Flock).

Burial at Yanaka

Archbishop Nicholas was buried, by the Emperor’s leave, at the Tokyo Metropolitan Yanaka Cemetery, the great public cemetery near Ueno in the north of the city — reportedly near the grave of the last Tokugawa shogun, a juxtaposition that quietly closes the long story that had begun under the Tokugawa ban (Nicholas of Japan, Wikipedia; ROCA / Orthodox America; Nicholas of Japan, OrthodoxWiki). His grave at Yanaka became, and remains, a place of veneration — a destination for Orthodox pilgrims and for Japanese honoring the apostle of their land, and one of the two principal sites of his memory alongside the cathedral on Surugadai (see Nikolai-do).

The Succession

The Church Nicholas left was not left without a head. He was succeeded by his vicar, Bishop Sergius (Tikhomirov), who had been consecrated to assist him in his last years and who now took up the harder inheritance. Sergius would lead the Japanese Church through the most difficult period of its history — the years after the Russian Revolution of 1917, when the financial support from Russia on which the mission had depended was cut off at a stroke, and the Church Nicholas had founded had to learn to stand entirely on its own. It was also Sergius who oversaw the rebuilding of the Holy Resurrection Cathedral after the Great Kantō earthquake of 1923, which had ruined Nicholas’s great church on Surugadai (see Nikolai-do). The story of the Japanese Church after its founder is the story of how the indigenous Church he had aimed at proved able to survive the loss of its Russian lifeline — the subject taken up in the next file (see Canonization and the Church Today).

Nicholas had given his life to a single conviction: that the Orthodox faith could be Japanese, and that a Russian monk’s work was to make himself unnecessary by raising up a Church that was the Japanese people’s own (see An Indigenous Church; on the method, Asceticism and Method). The honors of 1912 — the imperial wreath, the burial within the city, the vast and largely Japanese crowd — were the first public testimony that he had succeeded. The Church’s own testimony would come fifty-eight years later, when it numbered him among the saints (see Canonization and the Church Today).

References

Saint Nicholas, Enlightener of Japan. Orthodox Church in America (oca.org/saints/lives/2026/02/03/100455-saint-nicholas-enlightener-of-japan), February 3. (The elevation to archbishop, dated 24 March 1906; “the age of seventy-six”; Emperor Meiji’s personal permission for burial within the city at Yanaka.)
Nicholas of Japan. Wikipedia. (The repose on 16 February 1912; born 1836, so age 75; burial at Yanaka near the last Tokugawa shogun; the 1907 archbishop/diocese figure.)
Nicholas of Japan. OrthodoxWiki (orthodoxwiki.org/Nicholas_of_Japan). (Dates of repose; the burial at Yanaka.)
Saint Nicholas Enlightener of Japan / orthodox.cn. (The repose dated “February 3/16, 1912.”)
Enlightener of Japan: Blessed Nicholas Kasatkin (Presbytera Doreen Bartholomew). Orthodox America / ROCA (roca.org/oa/volume-xii/issue-113-114/enlightener-of-japan-blessed-nicholas-kasatkin/). (The repose at 7:15 a.m.; the imperial wreath; the largest funeral ever given a foreigner in Japan.)
The Life of Equal-to-the-Apostles Nicholai, Archbishop of Japan. Saint Elisabeth Convent (obitel-minsk.org/en/the-life-of-equal-to-the-apostles-nicholai-archbishop-of-japan). (The imperial funeral wreath inscribed “On-Shi,” an honor rarely accorded a foreigner.)
Saint Nicholas of Japan, Equal-to-the-Apostles. mission2nihon (mission2nihon.substack.com). (The imperial wreath; the funeral procession of roughly ten kilometers.)
The Apostle to Japan (Fr. Edward Pehanich). ACROD (acrod.org). (The student choir of about two hundred voices singing the funeral office in Japanese.)