Biography | Adolfo Nicolás — Ordained After Theology on the Yotsuya Campus

People treat his Japanese years as a late posting after a European career.

The move came first.

In 1960, after a philosophy licentiate at Alcalá, Nicolás left Spain for Japan to learn the language and begin regency.

He then entered the theology faculty at Sophia University on the Yotsuya campus in Chiyoda, the Jesuit university founded in 1913 at 7-1 Kioicho.

On 17 March 1967 he was ordained a priest in Tokyo.

The public church beside the campus is St Ignatius, the parish that still faces the same block.

From 1968 to 1971 he studied at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome.

Official Jesuit notices call the degree a master's in sacred theology; later conference obituaries call it a doctorate.

The years and the place are not in dispute.

He returned to Sophia as a professor of systematic theology and taught there for decades, with a break for the Manila posting that followed.

The campus a visitor walks today is not the wooden compound of 1960.

The pin is still the right hill: the Jesuit university and the parish church that framed his first Japanese decade.

Photo: St Ignatius and Sophia, John Paul Antes / Georgfotoart, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Portrait: Hannes Heinsar, CC BY-SA 3.0, 2008.