[Canticle_of_Deborah]

David, just curious, if a person was in a Greek Orthodox Church in Japan, would the liturgy be in Japanese or in Greek? I think you are saying here it would be in Japanese. I gather then that Orthodox liturgy is offered in the vernacular?

[FormerLib]

A Greek Orthodox Church in Japan would probably have been established by Greeks living there so that they could worship in their native tongue. This is fairly common with Orthodox immigrants regardless of their location.

The Japanese Orthodox Church primarily uses Japanese but I understand that they have retained some Church Slavonic hymns simply because they like the sound of them.

Following the pattern established by the Saints Cyril and Methodius, Orthodox Churches always adopted the native language when they moved into a new area. This was particularly important in regards to the Gospel and was why the Russians translated the Bible into Aleut when they began establishing churches in Alaska.

[The_Reader_David]

Japan is not like North America where the normal canonical order of the Church was disrupted by the establishment of parallel ethnic jurisdictions in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution, which disturbed relations between the Archdiocese of Alaska and All-North-America and the Patriarchate of Moscow (under whose jursidiction all Orthodox Churches in North America had been), and the defeat of the Greeks in the Greco-Turkish War, which lead to a power-grab by the Ecumenical Patriarch in the establishment of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of North and South America (to keep his now scattered flock under his jurisdiction).

In Japan the normal canonical order prevails, and there is the Autonomous Church of Japan, whose liturgies are in Japanese. (High liturgical Japanese of the same style as Shinto and Buddhist liturgies, thanks to the work of St. Nicholas of Japan.). So, except for representation churches of the Ecumenical Patriarchate and the Church of Greece (which presumably use Greek in their liturgies) there aren't Greek Orthodox Churches in Japan, just Japanese Orthodox Churches. :-)===