First of all, lest you be misled by the title, Japan does not have its own ordinariate; it is part of the Australian ordinariate which is properly called The Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of the Southern Cross.

What's an ordinariate?

An ordinariate is a structure similar to a diocese in the Catholic Church which is headed by its own ordinary who could be either a bishop or a priest. Its jurisdiction covers a wide geographical area which overlaps existing Catholic dioceses. There are personal ordinariates and military ordinariates in the Catholic Church. The personal ordinariates allow Anglicans to enter the Catholic Church as groups rather than as individuals and preserve elements of their Anglican tradition, a.k.a. Anglican patrimony. Currently there are three personal ordinariates in the world.

A little history of the ordinariate in Japan

How did a Japanese-speaking branch of the ordinariate come into existence? And what does its Anglican patrimony look like in a Japanese context?

I live in Japan and was able to witness first-hand the unfolding of events over a span of nine years which led to the creation of the ordinariate community in Japan. I designed their web site and served as webmaster from 2010 to 2018, so I think I can offer a little information.

I am a former member of the Episcopal Church in America, and when I moved to Japan I became a member of the Anglican Church in Japan, the Nippon Sei Ko Kai (NSKK). Eventually I became very concerned with the direction the Episcopal/Anglican Church was heading, and started to look at the Catholic Church (my conversion story can be found here).

It was around this time, in November of 2009 that the news broke that Pope Benedict XVI had issued the Apostolic Constitution Anglicanorum Coetibus which would establish personal ordinariates for former Anglicans to come into the Catholic Church and bring many of their traditions with them. This was in response to requests by various Continuing Anglican groups such as the Traditional Anglican Communion (TAC).

In 2010 I discovered that a branch of TAC existed in Japan as well, and was mainly comprised of a small group of former Anglican priests and a few lay people, headed by the retired Anglican bishop of Yokohama, Raphael Kajiwara. Their name was the Nippon Kirisuto Sei Ko Kai (NKSKK) which differed from the NSKK by the addition of one word, Christ (Kirisuto). These priests were hoping to join the ordinariate as soon as it came to Japan.

I met Bishop Kajiwara that summer (2010) and joined the group which met about twice a year in a rented meeting room in Yokohama. At these meetings we would have an Anglican Communion service which was followed by discussions with snacks. I created their website in October of 2010 and got a server to host it, and maintained it as the web master for eight years until I handed it over to a Japanese webmaster in October of 2018. That website can be found at www.ordinariatejapan.org

The first ordinariate was established to cover England, Wales and Scotland in January of 2011 and was called the Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham.

We continued to hope and wait for the day when the ordinariate would come to Japan, and in February of 2011 Bishop John Hepworth the primate of TAC came from Australia to Japan and addressed our group. He explained that the plan was for us to be a deanery of the yet-to-be-established Australian ordinariate. This was very exciting news, and it seemed that an ordinariate in Japan would be a reality in a matter of months, and we would all come into the Catholic Church as a group.

But summer came around, and there was still no word of a new ordinariate being formed. Also, by this time it became pretty clear that the ordinariates were created for the sake of Anglicans in English-speaking countries where there was a rich English Anglican tradition. So I gave up on ever seeing an ordinariate in Japan. In August of 2011 I joined the Catholic Church as an individual, but continued to attend the NKSKK meetings as I still maintained their web site. Some of the original NKSKK priests vanished for reasons unknown to me. Bishop Kajiwara, Fr. Yamaoka of Hiroshima, and a few lay people remained in the NKSKK.

The following year, a second ordinariate was established to cover the United States and Canada in January of 2012 and was called the Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of Saint Peter. However, the TAC bishops voted to reject the ordinariate. Bishop Hepworth resigned as primate of TAC. The NKSKK also withdrew from TAC.

The third ordinariate was finally established in Australia in June of 2012 and was called the Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of the Southern Cross, but with no news of a deanery to be formed in Japan.

Then in January of 2015 I received an e-mail from Bishop Kajiwara, asking if I could change the NKSKK website or create a new one because he had just been ordained a Catholic priest by the Nuncio Archbishop Joseph Chennoth in the presence of the Ordinary Harry Entwistle, and was incardinated in the Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of the Southern Cross. Three lay people were brought into the ordinariate with him at the same time.

Apparently the plight of NKSKK remnant in Japan had not been forgotten, and this unique Japanese deanery within the ordinariate was created because it would not be good to abandon them as "straying sheep" as Fr. Kajiwara desribed the situation in an email to me.

Later, Fr. Yamaoka would also be ordained a Catholic priest in the Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of the Southern Cross.

So the ordinariate in Japan finally became a reality, and soon became two communities.

The first community was established in 2015 and is led by Fr. Kajiwara, and is called the Ordinariate Community of St. Augustine of Canterbury, Tokyo.

The second group was established in 2016, and is led by Fr. Yamaoka, and is called the Ordinariate Community of St. Laurence of Canterbury, Hiroshima.

The two ordinariate groups in Japan are still young and face challenges such as opposition from both the Anglican and Catholic hierarchy here in Japan. I hope and pray that they will grow and be blessed with more priests as well as members.

A look at an ordinariate Mass in Japan

Note: Fr. Kajiwara retired from his position in 2021, and Fr. Yamaoka of Hiroshima took over the leadership of both ordinariate communities in Japan. This article is a snapshot of the way things were in September 2019. I had originally included my personal concerns about the way things were done at the Ordinariate Mass I had attended, but no doubt there have been changes since that time, so I have removed them.

The Tokyo ordinariate Mass is celebrated in Yokohama which is about an hour or so by train southwest of Tokyo. They meet two or three times a year in the same small rented meeting room in Yokohama where the Japanese TAC group (NKSKK) had formerly met. Fr. Kajiwara had previously been the Anglican bishop of Yokohama.

The Hiroshima group has Mass every Sunday in Fr. Yamaoka's home.

This particular Tokyo/Yokohama Mass was on Monday, September 16, 2019 and had a total of twelve people present including two Catholic priests concelebrating, Fr. Kajiwara and Fr. Yamaoka -- who came up from Hiroshima -- plus two men who serve as acolytes and Extraordinary Ministers of Holy Communion.

There was also an Anglican priest and one Anglican deacon present. The remaining six attendees were lay people including one child, some were Anglicans who knew Fr. Kajiwara from his Anglican days, and some were Catholics, including me.

Except for me and one other person, all present were Japanese.

The altar was a folding table set up in the east corner of the room, and the priest faced the people (versus populum).

As one would expect, there is no big hard-bound Japanese edition of the Divine Worship Missal, but we have booklets which are stapled together. The imprint on the last page indicates that this is the Japanese translation of Divine Worship: The Missal.

I have participated in the Japanese ordinariate Mass several times in the past, but this time I paid close attention to the words to see if I could recognize disctinct Anglican elements from my days in the Japanese Anglican Church or Catholic elements from my current experience with the Japanese Novus Ordo, or even from the Traditional Latin Mass which I have also attended in the past.

I was also familiar with the ordinariate order of Mass in English according to the Divine Worship Missal by watching YouTube videos and studying the PDF texts. As it turns out, the Japanese translation of the Divine Worship Missal was pretty faithful to the English.

However, as you know, many elements of the Mass are used by both Catholics and Anglicans, including the Kyrie, the Gloria, the Nicene Creed, Sanctus, Agnus Dei, and the Mystery of Faith. This means that, rather than making a fresh translation of these elements into Japanese, they can be taken directly from existing Japanese sources, either the Japanese Book of Common Prayer or the Japanese Novus Ordo Missal.

I discovered that they were invariably taken from the Novus Ordo; not just the words, but also the tunes, so I would say that about eighty percent of the Mass was exactly the same as the Novus Ordo Mass which I had attended the day before at my own Catholic church.

The Tokyo ordinariate Mass typically meets on a Monday holiday, but uses the missal from the previous Sunday, and has Sunday Mass on Monday rather than a weekday Mass. As a matter of fact, a stack of Novus Ordo missalettes from the day before were on hand for everyone to have a copy. So even the Collects and Prayers of the People were from the Novus Ordo Mass the day before.

When we got to the Liturgy of the Eucharist, I was anticipating either the Roman Canon or the Alternative Eucharistic Prayer. Both are used in the Ordinariate Mass in English-speaking countries.

What I heard from the altar in Yokohama was Eucharistic Prayer 2 from the Japanese Novus Ordo Roman Missal verbatim with elements such as the Prayer of Humble Access inserted at their proper places.

I am a former Anglican and am familiar with the Japanese Anglican Communion service, but I was not necessarily looking for Anglican patrimony.

While the concept of Anglican patrimony is a bit elusive, many would argue that it is inseparable from the dignified English language of Thomas Cranmer who produced the original Book of Common Prayer, and Miles Coverdale who translated the Psalter in the Book of Common Prayer. (Of course, there is also the beautiful English of the Authorized King James Bible, but that huge pillar of Anglican patrimony for the most part did not make the transition into the English-speaking ordinariates).

The works of Cranmer and Coverdale were based on Latin texts and were produced in the 14th century when the English language was at the pinnacle of its beauty. The Catholic Church, on the other hand, did not allow the use of English in its liturgy until the 1960s when the English language had become rather bland. That's why so many Catholics in English-speaking countries who experience an ordinariate Mass for the first time are amazed at how beautiful the Mass can be.

The language of the Anglican Church in Japan is of course Japanese, so the language element of Anglican patrimony has never existed in Japan outside of a few English language Anglican worship services for foreigners.

Regarding language, the current prayer book of Anglican Church in Japan was produced in 1986, and uses modern Japanese. As a matter of fact, Father Kajiwara was on the team that produced the prayer book, and told me that they drew heavily from the corresponding Catholic sources. The title on the cover is "prayer book" in Japanese (KITOU-SHO) rather than the "Book of Common Prayer" and the Thirty Nine Articles are not included.

So with the beautiful English of Cranmer and Coverdale and King James out of the equation, I suppose it makes little difference whether the Japanese Ordinariate texts match the current Anglican or Catholic texts since there is not much difference between the two, and both are in contemporary Japanese.

Perhaps this is a wise option for an ordinariate Mass that only meets a few times a year, and is comprised mainly of Catholics who normally attend a Novus Ordo Mass; everything is already familiar. It comes down to whether the visiting Catholics or visiting Anglicans must struggle with the words and tunes in the Ordinariate Mass. The lot fell to the Anglicans.

Music is also a major element of Anglican patrimony, and while the sung parts of the liturgy came directly from the Japanese Novus Ordo, there were a few hymns from the Anglican hymnal. The language was Japanese but the tunes and harmonies were Anglican. At those times I noticed that the few Anglicans in the room were singing louder than the Catholics. There was no organ or piano, and all the music was sung unaccompanied (a cappella).

The Gospel Reading was read by the visiting Anglican priest who was in vestments. But other than this, he remained at his seat among the laity and did not concelebrate behind the altar.

Communion was offered under both kinds, which is still uncommon in the Japanese Catholic Mass. Father Kajiwara distributed the consecrated Host, and one of the Extraordinary Ministers of Holy Communion held the Chalice for the people. The consecrated Host was received in the hand, but a few opted to receive it on the tongue.

The final hymn was taken from the current Japanese Catholic hymnal rather than the Anglican hymnal. It was familiar to the Catholics in the room who sang louder than the Anglicans at this point.

After Mass, we brought out the folding tables and chairs and had soft drinks and snacks and discussion which began with self introductions. I typically excuse myself and sneak away during snack/fellowship time since I try to be home in Tokyo by dinner time, and it can take up to an hour and a half for me to return by train.