Equal-to-the-Apostles Nicholas of Japan

CORRECTION: the category has been corrected from "righteous" to "equal-to-the-apostles"; the previously listed date (February 3/16) was confirmed by research to be correct.

Ivan Dmitrievich Kasatkin graduated from the St. Petersburg Theological Academy and, responding to a call for a missionary priest to serve the consular church in Hakodate, was tonsured a monk under the name Nicholas on June 23, 1860, and soon ordained hieromonk. He arrived in Japan in 1861, when Christianity was officially banned and foreigners viewed with hostility; he spent years mastering Japanese language, culture, history, and Buddhist-Shinto religious texts before beginning to preach.

His missionary work proved extraordinarily successful: in 1868 he baptized his first Japanese convert (a former samurai and Shinto priest, Sawabe Takuma), founded the Russian Ecclesiastical Mission in Japan, headquartered in Tokyo (from 1872). He built a cathedral (Nikolai-do), a seminary, schools, an orphanage, and a library, and personally translated the New Testament and most of the liturgical corpus into Japanese — a monumental undertaking done in collaboration with Japanese assistants.

He was consecrated bishop in 1880 and elevated to archbishop in 1906. During the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905 he made the difficult decision to remain with his flock in Japan rather than return to Russia, instructing Japanese Orthodox believers to pray for Japan's victory as loyal subjects, while personally organizing pastoral care and material aid for Russian prisoners of war — an act widely praised by both sides for its moral integrity. By his death in 1912 the Japanese Orthodox Church numbered over 33,000 believers with a fully indigenous clergy. He was canonized Equal-to-the-Apostles by the Moscow Patriarchate on April 10, 1970 (and by ROCOR in 1994).

His feast is kept on February 3/16.