Aboard the Missouri in Tokyo Bay, Japan signs its surrender; the war is over
Three weeks after Japan announced it would surrender, the paperwork still had to be signed. On September 2, 1945, delegates from Japan and the Allied powers gathered on the quarterdeck of the battleship USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay to sign the Japanese Instrument of Surrender. General Douglas MacArthur signed for the Allies, with Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz representing the United States, while Foreign Minister Mamoru Shigemitsu signed for Japan. By 9:30 that morning the Japanese emissaries had left the ship.
The ceremony sat on American steel because the U.S. Navy had earned the deck it stood on: by 1945 it accounted for over 70 percent of the world's naval tonnage in vessels of 1,000 tons or greater, which the Navy had built from scratch after Pearl Harbor into a two-ocean force. The surrender also launched the American-led occupation of Japan, which by 1947 produced a new Japanese constitution largely shaped by Allied, and chiefly American, authorship.
QWhy was a 92-year-old flag flown at the surrender ceremony?
The Naval Academy Museum sent a flag that had flown from one of Commodore Matthew Perry's ships when he sailed into Japan in 1853 and forced the country open to Western trade. Displaying it aboard the Missouri in 1945 tied the end of the Pacific War back to the very beginning of America's dealings with Japan, ninety-two years earlier, closing a symbolic loop in America's dealings with Japan.
QHow many nations besides the United States put a signature on the Japanese surrender document?
Eight other Allied powers signed alongside the United States: the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, Australia, Canada, France, the Netherlands, New Zealand, and China. Each delegation signed in a fixed order after MacArthur, with each of the nine Allied signatures representing a member of the wartime coalition against Japan.
QWhich legal document specifically obligated Japan to issue the Instrument of Surrender?
The Japanese Instrument of Surrender was issued on September 2, 1945, in direct compliance with the Potsdam Declaration, the ultimatum the Allies had issued weeks earlier demanding Japan's unconditional surrender. That declaration had laid out the terms Japan would be held to, and the Tokyo Bay ceremony put Japan's formal acceptance of those terms into a signed legal record. Without a document tying the ceremony to Potsdam, the surrender would have lacked the binding, treaty-like force the Allies needed to justify the occupation that followed. The signing on the Missouri's deck put Japan's formal acceptance of the Potsdam terms into a signed legal record.
