Дневники св. Николая Японского. Том

Nikolai thought that Japanese people, although they were ’heathens’, were experiencing deep religious feelings and that Christianity could become firmly rooted in such natural religious feelings. This was how Nikolai intended to go about implanting Orthodox beliefs in the minds of Japanese people. He did not want to lure them out of their native religious feelings by Western learning, but attempted to transplant Christianity into the traditional religious ’soil’ of Japan — to infuse Orthodox Christianity into the Japanese spirit. His good knowledge of

Japanese religious culture and history must have suggested to him this way of propagating the Gospel. He was convinced that by this method, he could gain an advantage over Protestant and Catholic missionaries in Japan.

In general, the Japanese Orthodox Church has had a tendency to put more value upon Japanese traditional formalities than other Christian groups. It may be said that its conservatism has been partly due to Nikolai’s respect for Japanese culture.

During the Russo–Japanese War of 1904–1905, few Orthodox Japanese were tortured by spiritual conflict between their Orthodox faith (introduced by Russian missionaries) and their own patriotism. Although they were Orthodox Christians, they prayed fervently for divine favor to Japan. Nikolai himself, in one speech and two circular letters to his flock, summoned Orthodox Japanese to fulfill their duties as faithful subjects — to pray for the victory of the Japanese Imperial forces. His diaries also tell us that he thought it was natural for Orthodox Japanese to pray for the victory of their fatherland. Nikolai seems to have regarded the Orthodox belief, once implanted in Japan, as Japanese Orthodoxy.

Nikolai himself was a truly patriotic Russian. His patriotism was not an abstract idea but an ardent emotion. And so he was terribly depressed when he heard the news that Russian army had suffered defeats in Manchuria and that Japan won the naval battle in the Sea of Japan.

He also had a genuine and steadfast love for Japanese Orthodox Church, which had been established and developed by him, and which was like his child. When the Russo–Japanese War broke out, he was forced to devide his love into two — his mother country (Russia) and his ’child’ (the Japanese Church). He understood that it was natural for the Japanese people to openly rejoice over the news of Japanese victory, but he could not help feeling so sincere pity at Russia that he sometimes could not participate in the liturgy.

As we have seen, The Diaries of St. Nikolai of Japan are a document of great value both to historians and to the reading public. With these diaries, together with the newsletters Kyokai Hochi and Seikyo Shimpo, we will be able to obtain a complete picture of the Japanese Orthodox Church in the Meiji era. In other words, we cannot relate the truth of the Church history without these diaries.

The Beginning of the Study of Nikolai’s Diaries

It had been known that Nikolai was writing a diary. Bishop Sergii (Tikhomirov), Nikolai’s successor in the overall control of the Japanese Orthodox Church, wrote in his memoirs on Nikolai («Before and After the Passing Away of Archbishop Nikolai» of 1912), that Nikolai was writing about the state of his disease in his diary. However, it was not expected that his diaries would come down to us. Most of the archives relating to Nikolai had disappeared during the chaos following the Great Earthquake of 1923, and no diary was found at the Cathedral of the Resurrection in Tokyo (Nikolai–do, Nikolai’s Cathedral). No Soviet Japanologists or historians were aware that Nikolai’s diaries had been safely kept at the Central State Historical Archive in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg).

It appears that between the time of Nikolai’s passing away (1912) and the Great Kan to Earthquake (1923), a certain Russian who was close to Nikolai sent the diaries to Russia, perhaps into the keeping of the Archive of the Holy Synod. The person who sent them to Russia must have been Bishop Sergii.

A few clergy of the Russian Orthodox Church during the Soviet era knew of the preservation of Nikolai’s diaries in the Archive, but during that time Soviet sciences and the Church were under the complete control of the Communist Party. There was so little interdisciplinary communication or interchange that research fellows of the Soviet scientific institutions never learned of the existence of the diaries from the churchmen. Of course, there was no attempt made to decipher the handwritten diaries and publish them.

The first Japanese reader of Nikolai’s diaries in the Archive at Leningrad was Prof. Kennosuke Nakamura of Hokkaido University, the author of this preface. In the autumn of 1979, he confirmed the existence of the dairies and acquired a microfilm copy of them from the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Since then, Nikolai’s diaries have become the focus of much academic research.