The study is devoted to the penetration of Christianity into Japan and translations of the Bible into Japanese. The first part of the work tells about missionary work and the history of translations of the Roman Cathodic Church, Protestant churches and the Russian Spiritual Mission in Japan in the 16th - 20th centuries. The history of the emergence of each of the Orthodox liturgical texts in Japanese is traced, according to the diary entries of St. Nicholas of Japan and his associate Pavel Nakai Tsugumaro. The work provides a decoding of Pavel Nakai's notebook of 1894.