Surrender of Japan (1945): VJ Day and the End of World War II

The surrender of Japan in August and September 1945 brought the Second World War to an end. After the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Soviet declaration of war, Emperor Hirohito announced in a radio broadcast on 15 August 1945 that Japan would accept the Allied terms, and the formal surrender was signed aboard the battleship USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay on 2 September.

The surrender ended a war that, in Asia, had begun with Japan’s invasion of China in 1937 and had spread across the Pacific after the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. It is remembered as VJ Day, Victory over Japan Day, and it opened the Allied occupation that transformed modern Japan.

Background

By mid-1945 Japan’s military position was hopeless. Its navy had been largely destroyed, American submarines and mines had cut its sea routes, and American bombers were burning its cities, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians. The battles of Iwo Jima and Okinawa had brought American forces to Japan’s doorstep.

Yet Japan’s leaders were divided. Real power lay with six men, the inner cabinet often called the Big Six. Prime Minister Kantarō Suzuki, Foreign Minister Shigenori Tōgō and Navy Minister Mitsumasa Yonai increasingly wanted to end the war. Army Minister Korechika Anami and the two chiefs of staff, General Yoshijirō Umezu and Admiral Soemu Toyoda, believed Japan should fight a final decisive battle on the home islands to obtain better terms.

Both sides were preparing for that battle. Japan’s defence plan, Ketsu-Go, concentrated troops, thousands of aircraft held back for suicide attacks and civilian militia on Kyushu, where its commanders correctly expected the first landing. The American plan, Operation Downfall, called for an invasion of southern Kyushu in November 1945, code-named Olympic, followed by a landing near Tokyo in the spring of 1946, code-named Coronet. Intelligence in the summer of 1945 showed Japanese forces on Kyushu growing far faster than American planners had assumed, raising fears of enormous casualties on both sides.

Japan had approached the still-neutral Soviet Union in the hope that it would mediate a peace. Moscow, which had already promised the Western Allies at Yalta that it would join the war against Japan, gave no clear answer.

The Potsdam Declaration

On 26 July 1945, during the Potsdam Conference, the United States, Britain and China issued the Potsdam Declaration. It called on Japan to surrender unconditionally, promised the removal of militarist leaders, occupation, disarmament and trials of war criminals, and warned that the alternative was “prompt and utter destruction”. It said nothing about the future of the emperor.

On 28 July Prime Minister Suzuki told the press that the government would treat the declaration with mokusatsu, a word that can mean to ignore or to withhold comment. The Allies understood it as a rejection.

August 1945: bombs and invasion

On 6 August the atomic bombing of Hiroshima destroyed most of the city. Late on 8 August the Soviet Union declared war on Japan, and shortly after midnight Soviet forces began the Soviet invasion of Manchuria, quickly overwhelming the Japanese Kwantung Army. That same morning, 9 August, a second atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki.

The Big Six met on 9 August and remained deadlocked. Tōgō argued for accepting the Potsdam terms with one condition, the preservation of the imperial institution. Anami, Umezu and Toyoda wanted further conditions: no occupation, Japanese control over disarmament and Japanese trials of war criminals.

Late that night, at an imperial conference held in an air-raid shelter at the palace, Suzuki took the unprecedented step of asking the emperor to decide. Hirohito supported Tōgō’s position. On 10 August Japan informed the Allies, through neutral Switzerland and Sweden, that it accepted the declaration on the understanding that it did not prejudice the prerogatives of the emperor as sovereign ruler.

The Byrnes Note and the final decision

The American reply, drafted under Secretary of State James Byrnes and sent on 11 August, neither accepted nor rejected the condition. It stated that from the moment of surrender the authority of the emperor and the Japanese government would be subject to the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers, and that Japan’s ultimate form of government would be established by the freely expressed will of the Japanese people.

The reply reopened the argument in Tokyo. On 14 August, at a second imperial conference, Hirohito again intervened and declared that the war must end. Japan notified the Allies that it accepted the terms. That night the emperor recorded an imperial rescript to be broadcast to the nation the next day.

The coup attempt and the broadcast

In the early hours of 15 August, a group of junior army officers led by Major Kenji Hatanaka tried to stop the surrender. They killed Lieutenant General Takeshi Mori, commander of the Imperial Guards Division, issued forged orders, occupied parts of the palace grounds and searched for the recording of the emperor’s speech. Senior army commanders refused to join them, the recording was safely hidden, and the coup, known as the Kyūjō incident, collapsed. Hatanaka shot himself. Anami, who had not joined the plot, took his own life the same morning.

At noon on 15 August the recording was broadcast across Japan and the empire. Speaking in formal court language, the emperor explained that the war situation had not developed to Japan’s advantage, referred to a “new and most cruel bomb”, and said Japan must pave the way for peace by “enduring the unendurable and suffering what is insufferable”, as the passage is usually translated. For most Japanese it was the first time they had heard the emperor’s voice.

VJ Day

In the United States, President Harry Truman announced Japan’s acceptance on the evening of 14 August, Washington time, setting off huge celebrations in New York’s Times Square and across the country. In Britain, Australia and other Allied countries, 15 August was celebrated as VJ Day. The day was especially emotional for families of prisoners of war held by Japan, many of whom had suffered terribly in camps and on projects such as the Burma Railway.

Fighting did not stop everywhere at once. Soviet forces continued their offensive in Manchuria, Korea, southern Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands for days after the broadcast, and the Soviet occupation of the southern Kurils was completed only in early September. Prince Naruhiko Higashikuni, a member of the imperial family, became prime minister on 17 August to ensure that the armed forces obeyed the order to lay down their arms.

The signing aboard USS Missouri

General Douglas MacArthur, appointed Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, landed at Atsugi airfield near Tokyo on 30 August. On the morning of 2 September 1945 the Japanese delegation came aboard the battleship USS Missouri, anchored in Tokyo Bay with hundreds of Allied ships.

Foreign Minister Mamoru Shigemitsu signed the Instrument of Surrender on behalf of the emperor and government, and General Umezu on behalf of the Imperial General Headquarters. MacArthur then signed, with Lieutenant General Jonathan Wainwright and Lieutenant General Arthur Percival, who had surrendered at Corregidor and Singapore in 1942 and had just been freed from captivity, standing behind him. Admiral Chester Nimitz signed for the United States, followed by representatives of China, Britain, the Soviet Union, Australia, Canada, France, the Netherlands and New Zealand.

The ceremony lasted only about 20 minutes. A flag flown by Commodore Matthew Perry’s squadron when it arrived in Japan in 1853 was displayed on the ship. A small error by the Canadian representative, who signed on the wrong line of the Japanese copy, had to be corrected by hand. President Truman proclaimed 2 September as the official VJ Day in the United States.

Consequences

Further surrenders followed across Asia: in China at Nanjing on 9 September, in Korea, where the peninsula was divided at the 38th parallel between American and Soviet forces, and at Singapore on 12 September. Millions of Japanese soldiers and civilians overseas had to be repatriated, while hundreds of thousands of prisoners taken by the Soviet Union were held in labour camps, where many died. A few isolated soldiers, unaware of or refusing to accept the surrender, held out in the jungle for decades.

Japan was occupied until 28 April 1952. Under MacArthur the occupation demilitarised the country, held the Tokyo war crimes trials and introduced a new constitution in 1947 that renounced war and made the emperor a symbol of the state. Hirohito was not prosecuted and remained on the throne until his death in 1989. The Soviet Union and Japan ended their state of war in 1956 but never signed a peace treaty, and the dispute over the southern Kuril Islands remains unresolved.

Timeline

• 1945, 26 July: The Potsdam Declaration calls for Japan’s unconditional surrender.
• 1945, 6 August: An atomic bomb destroys Hiroshima.
• 1945, 8–9 August: The Soviet Union declares war and invades Manchuria; Nagasaki is bombed.
• 1945, 10 August: Japan offers to accept the declaration if the emperor’s prerogatives are preserved.
• 1945, 14 August: Hirohito decides on surrender at a second imperial conference.
• 1945, 15 August, noon: The emperor’s broadcast announces the decision; VJ Day in Britain.
• 1945, 30 August: MacArthur arrives in Japan.
• 1945, 2 September: The Instrument of Surrender is signed aboard USS Missouri.

Why it matters

The surrender of Japan ended the Second World War, the deadliest conflict in human history. It closed Japan’s empire in Asia, opened the way for the independence and division of countries such as Korea, and launched the occupation that turned Japan into a democratic, demilitarised state and a close ally of the United States.