Japanese Instrument of Surrender

Based on Wikipedia: Japanese Instrument of Surrender

Twenty-Three Minutes That Ended a World War

On the morning of September 2, 1945, a ceremony lasting barely twenty-three minutes brought the deadliest conflict in human history to its formal close. The setting was the deck of an American battleship anchored in Tokyo Bay. The participants included generals, admirals, and diplomats from ten nations. And the document they signed—two copies, one for the Allies and one for Japan—would become known simply as the Japanese Instrument of Surrender.

But the story of that document begins not on the deck of the USS Missouri, but in the war-ravaged ruins of Manila.

Finding Parchment in the Rubble

General Douglas MacArthur's staff faced an unusual challenge. Someone needed to actually write the surrender document, and write it on paper worthy of such a historic moment. This proved surprisingly difficult in a city that had been devastated by combat just months earlier.

Colonel LeGrande A. Diller led the effort. His team scoured Manila for suitable materials until an enterprising staff member discovered rare parchment in the basement of a monastery. This salvaged paper, pulled from religious archives, would carry the signatures that ended the Pacific War.

The political negotiations over who would sign proved even more complicated than finding the paper.

Who Gets to Sign?

The British government initially assumed that representatives from its Commonwealth nations—Australia, Canada, New Zealand—would attend the ceremony as subordinates to the United Kingdom's own representative. Australia balked at this arrangement. MacArthur, perhaps recognizing that Australian forces had fought extensively in the Pacific, supported their demand to sign separately.

Australia got its wish, though Australian officials then objected when MacArthur recommended that Canada, the Netherlands, and France also receive separate signature lines. In the end, all nine Allied nations signed independently: the United States, China, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, Australia, Canada, France, the Netherlands, and New Zealand.

The Japanese side faced an even more awkward problem: nobody wanted to go.

The Unpleasant Task

Prime Minister Higashikuni, a member of the Imperial family, could not attend—his presence would have been seen as too humiliating. Prince Fumimaro Konoe simply refused. Finding delegates willing to formally surrender the Japanese Empire required a personal appeal from Emperor Hirohito himself.

Eventually, Foreign Minister Mamoru Shigemitsu and General Yoshijirō Umezu, Chief of the Army General Staff, agreed to serve as the two signatories. Nine additional delegates accompanied them: three from the Army, three from the Navy, and three from the Foreign Ministry. For security reasons, only the names of the two signatories were revealed to the press until the morning of the ceremony.

The eleven Japanese delegates left Tokyo by car early on September 2, boarded the destroyer USS Lansdowne at Yokohama, and sailed out to where the Missouri lay at anchor in the bay.

The Ceremony

At precisely 9:04 in the morning, Shigemitsu signed the document with the words "By Command and in behalf of the Emperor of Japan and the Japanese Government." Two minutes later, General Umezu added his signature "By Command and in behalf of the Japanese Imperial General Headquarters."

Then came the Allied signatures, each carefully timed and recorded.

At 9:08, MacArthur signed as Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, accepting the surrender on behalf of all the nations arrayed against Japan. Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz followed at 9:12, signing for the United States. General Hsu Yung-chang signed for China at 9:13. Admiral Sir Bruce Fraser signed for the United Kingdom at 9:14.

The Soviet representative, Lieutenant General Kuzma Derevyanko, signed at 9:16. The Soviets had declared war on Japan only weeks earlier, on August 8, and their forces were still advancing through Manchuria and the northern Japanese islands even as the ceremony took place.

General Sir Thomas Blamey signed for Australia at 9:17, Colonel Lawrence Moore Cosgrave for Canada at 9:18, and Général Philippe Leclerc de Hauteclocque for France at 9:20. Lieutenant Admiral Conrad Helfrich signed for the Netherlands at 9:21, and Air Vice-Marshal Leonard Isitt completed the Allied signatures for New Zealand at 9:22.

The entire ceremony was broadcast live around the world.

Two Flags and a Common Myth

The deck of the Missouri that morning displayed two American flags. A popular story claims that one of these flags had flown over the White House on December 7, 1941, the day Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. It makes for a satisfying narrative arc—the same flag present at the beginning and end of America's war with Japan.

The story is completely false.

Captain Stuart Murray of the Missouri later explained in detail: "These were just regular ship's flags, GI issue, that we'd pulled out of the spares, nothing special about them, and they had never been used anywhere so far as we know, at least they were clean and we had probably gotten them in Guam in May."

Murray was characteristically blunt about the myth: "Some of the articles in the history say this was the same flag that was flown on the White House or the National Capitol on 7 December 1941... The only thing I can say is they were hard up for baloney."

But there was one genuinely historic flag present.

Commodore Perry's Flag

Ninety-two years before the surrender ceremony, Commodore Matthew Perry had sailed into this same Tokyo Bay with a squadron of American warships. His mission in 1853 was to force Japan to open its ports to foreign trade after centuries of isolation. Perry succeeded, and the resulting treaties marked Japan's reluctant entry into the modern international order.

Perry's flag from that expedition—a thirty-one-star banner representing the United States of 1853—was flown out from the Naval Academy Museum specifically for the surrender ceremony. An officer messenger brought it aboard in its protective glass case, and it was hung over the door of the captain's cabin, facing the surrender deck so all participants could see it.

The symbolism was pointed. Japan's modern military power, which had challenged the Western nations that forced it open, was now being formally extinguished in the same waters where that opening began.

Photographs of the ceremony show something curious: Perry's flag appears to be displayed backward, with the stars in the upper right corner rather than the upper left. This wasn't an error. American flag protocol specifies that when a flag is displayed on the right side of an object, person, or vehicle, the stars should appear in the upper right—as if the flag were attached to a pole and moving forward into battle, rather than retreating from it.

There was also a practical reason. The historic flag's cloth had grown so fragile that conservators at the Naval Academy Museum had sewn a protective backing onto it. This meant only the reverse side could safely be shown. And so Perry's flag watched over the ceremony from behind, its thirty-one stars a reminder of how much both nations had changed since their first encounter.

The Canadian Signing Error

The ceremony went smoothly except for one small diplomatic crisis.

Two copies of the Instrument of Surrender had been prepared—one for the Allied powers and one for Japan to retain. When Colonel Cosgrave of Canada signed the Japanese copy, he placed his signature on the wrong line, writing below where he should have written above. Every subsequent signatory then had to sign one line below their intended position, throwing off the entire bottom half of the document.

This error was attributed to Cosgrave having lost an eye during World War I—the first of the twentieth century's global conflicts, in which Canada and Japan had actually been allies against Germany.

When the discrepancy was discovered and pointed out to General Richard K. Sutherland, MacArthur's chief of staff, he took a practical approach. He crossed out the pre-printed titles identifying each Allied nation and handwrote the correct titles in their new positions.

The Japanese delegation initially found this handwritten alteration unacceptable. A formal surrender document with crossed-out text and scribbled corrections hardly seemed appropriate for such a momentous occasion. The standoff ended only when Sutherland initialed each correction as a form of abbreviated signature, satisfying the Japanese requirement for proper authentication.

With that small drama resolved, the Japanese representatives departed without further complaint.

The Pens

MacArthur used six pens to sign the Instrument of Surrender, distributing most of them as historic souvenirs. Two went to men who had particular reason to witness Japan's defeat.

General Jonathan Wainwright had commanded American forces in the Philippines after MacArthur's departure in 1942. He had surrendered to the Japanese at Corregidor and spent the rest of the war as a prisoner. Lieutenant General Arthur Percival had surrendered Singapore to the Japanese in what Winston Churchill called the worst disaster in British military history. Both men had been specially flown to Tokyo Bay to witness the surrender, and each received one of MacArthur's signing pens.

Wainwright's pen eventually went to the West Point Museum. Percival's was donated to the Cheshire Military Museum in England.

A fifth pen belonged to MacArthur's aide Courtney Whitney; MacArthur used it during the signing and then returned it afterward. The Whitney family still owns it. The sixth and final pen was bright red rather than black, and MacArthur gave it to his wife Jean. It was later stolen from her.

MacArthur left two additional black pens on the signing table for other representatives to use if they wished. Admiral Bruce Fraser, signing for the United Kingdom, used both of these pens and then attempted to copy MacArthur's gesture by giving them to his two witnesses as souvenirs.

MacArthur's aides immediately retrieved the pens from Fraser's witnesses and returned them to the general.

American General Jimmy Doolittle—famous for leading the first air raid on Tokyo in 1942—was standing nearby and reportedly whispered to those around him: "I see the British are still lend-leasing our equipment."

Those two black Waterman pens are now at the MacArthur Memorial in Norfolk, Virginia.

Where the Documents Went

On September 6, 1945, Colonel Bernard Theilen arrived in Washington carrying the Allied copy of the Instrument of Surrender. He also brought related documents including a copy of Emperor Hirohito's August 15 surrender rescript—the radio broadcast in which the Emperor had told his subjects that "the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan's advantage"—and the formal credentials authorizing Shigemitsu and Umezu to sign on Japan's behalf. All three documents bore the State Seal of Japan.

President Harry Truman received these documents in a formal White House ceremony the next day. General Wainwright, who had endured three years of captivity, led the presentation ceremony. The documents were then exhibited at the National Archives alongside regional surrender instruments signed after the Missouri ceremony: in the Philippines on September 3, in Korea on September 9, and in Southeast Asia on September 12.

The National Archives formally received the documents into its permanent holdings on October 1, 1945. They remain in the National Archives Building in Washington today.

Japan's copy of the Instrument went to the Diplomatic Archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Tokyo. It was last publicly displayed in 2015, marking the seventieth anniversary of the signing. A replica is available for viewing at the archives' gallery and at the Edo-Tokyo Museum.

The Facsimiles

MacArthur was instructed to create eleven full-sized facsimiles of the Instrument for distribution among the Allied nations. These copies were bound in blue leather and reproduced on watermarked paper matching the original.

MacArthur later ordered additional copies, some bound in red leather for presentation to personal guests who had attended the ceremony. The exact number of these personal copies is disputed, and some were produced in smaller sizes with different watermarks.

The Republic of China's facsimile is now held at the National Museum of History in Taiwan. In 2016, along with seven other historic documents, it was designated a National Treasure by Taiwan's Ministry of Culture. This designation carries particular weight given the complicated relationship between Taiwan and mainland China—both claim to be the legitimate successor to the Republic of China that signed the surrender document in 1945.

Two of the personal facsimiles, originally given to Colonel Diller and Filipino Major General Basilio Valdes, were purchased in the late twentieth century by collector Kenneth W. Rendell for The International Museum of World War II in Natick, Massachusetts. That entire collection was subsequently bought by businessman and philanthropist Ronald Lauder.

Victory Over Japan Day

September 2, 1945, is sometimes called Victory over Japan Day, or V-J Day. But that designation more commonly refers to August 15, when Emperor Hirohito made his unprecedented radio broadcast—known in Japanese as the Gyokuon-hōsō, or "Jewel Voice Broadcast"—announcing Japan's acceptance of the Potsdam Declaration's terms.

The distinction matters because the two dates mark different things. August 15 was when the fighting effectively stopped and when most Japanese civilians first learned their country had surrendered. September 2 was when that surrender became official under international law.

Different countries observe different dates. The United States formally commemorates September 2, while many other nations mark August 15. The confusion is appropriate in its way—wars rarely end with the clean finality we might wish for.

The Legacy

The Japanese Instrument of Surrender ended hostilities but not the state of war. That required a peace treaty, which would not come until 1951 with the Treaty of San Francisco. Japan and the Soviet Union never signed that treaty and did not normalize relations until the Soviet-Japanese Joint Declaration of 1956. Technically, Russia and Japan remain without a formal peace treaty to this day, their relationship complicated by an ongoing territorial dispute over the Kuril Islands.

The Missouri remained in service until 1992, participating in both the Korean War and the Gulf War. The ship is now a museum in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. Visitors can stand on the surrender deck where the ceremony took place. A plaque marks the exact spot where the Japanese delegates signed away their empire.

A replica of Commodore Perry's flag hangs where the original once did. The original remains at the Naval Academy Museum, along with the table and tablecloth used during the signing. The bronze plaque that originally marked the signing location was replaced with two replicas in 1990, presumably because the original had deteriorated or because museum officials worried about its security.

Fleet Admiral Nimitz signed the surrender document with two pens. One, borrowed from a Chinese neighbor and close friend, now resides in the Nanjing Museum in China. The other is at the United States Naval Academy Museum.

And somewhere, presumably in a private collection, is Jean MacArthur's stolen red pen—the last of the six her husband used to accept Japan's surrender, waiting perhaps to surface again at some future auction, a small bright artifact from twenty-three minutes that changed the world.