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{{orthodoxyinjapan}}
His Grace the Right Reverend [[Bishop ]] '''Nicholas (Ono) of Japan''' was consecrated as the ruling bishop of the [[Church of Japan]] in 1941 when the militaristic Japanese government required the heads of all religious groups in Japan to be Japanese nationals. He was the first Japanese national to be consecrated an Orthodox bishop.[[Image:Nicholas (Ono) Bp of Japan.jpg|left|thumb|px200|Bishop Nicholas (Ono) of Japan]]==Life==The future Bp. Nicholas was born Kiichi Yamazaki on [[September 8]], 1872, in the village of Kannami in Shizuoka Prefecture. When he was still in elementary school, his older brother, Yamazaki Kenzaburō, was [[baptize]]d into the Orthodox faith under the name of Sabbas and became a catechist. As young Kiichi finished his education at school, he hoped to continue learning and went to Tokyo where he was introduced to [[Archbishop]] [[Nicholas of Japan|Nicholas (Kasatkin)]] and entered the [[Tokyo Orthodox Seminary (Tokyo, Japan)|Orthodox Seminary]] in Tokyo, being baptized under the name of John in 1885. John completed his education in 1892 and became a catechist, following in the footsteps of his older brother. In 1894 he married Vera (Faith) Ono accepting her family name. His wife, Vera Shin, was the daughter of Fr. John Atsure Sakai, the first Japanese [[ordination|ordained]] an Orthodox [[priest]]. On [[bishopMarch 19]], 1905, with Abp. Nicholas officiating, he was ordained to priesthood and was assigned to be the priest of the church in Takasaki where he spent over thirty years, acquiring a rich pastoral experience. Suddenly, as the wartime pressures on the Orthodox Church in Japan were mounting, he was reassigned in 1939 to the Yokohama Orthodox Church. When in 1939 the increasingly nationalistic Japanese government passed a law requiring government authorization of all religious bodies in Japan for them to be legal. The government implementation of the law included the requirement that religious groups must be headed by Japanese nationals. In this [[Sergius (Tikhomirov) of Japan|Metr. Sergius]], who was the [[Archbishop]] of Tokyo and [[Metropolitan]]of All Japan, and the governing bodies of the Japanese Orthodox Church faced a grave predicament that resulted in a split among the church authorities into two groups on how this would be accomplished.
[[Category:Bishops]]
[[Category:Bishops of Tokyo]]
[[Category:20th-century bishops]]