Victory over Japan — V-J Day
On 2 September 1945, Japanese Foreign Minister Mamoru Shigemitsu and General Yoshijiro Umezu signed the instrument of surrender aboard the battleship USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay, in the presence of General Douglas MacArthur, Admiral Nimitz, and representatives of all Allied powers. Emperor Hirohito's broadcast announcement of surrender on 15 August — his voice heard on radio for the first time — had ended the fighting; the formal ceremony concluded the Second World War. The Pacific War had lasted from Japan's attack on China in 1937 (or Pearl Harbor in 1941, by Western reckoning) to this September morning. It had killed between 25 and 35 million people, the great majority of them Chinese civilians. Japan's defeat ended its empire, dismantled decades of colonial and military expansion, and began a US occupation that would transform Japanese society, write a pacifist constitution, and anchor Japan within the American strategic sphere — a transformation as complete as Germany's in Europe. The world that emerged from V-J Day was divided between two nuclear-armed superpowers, the age of European colonial empires was ending, and the Cold War had already begun.
- Year: 1945 CE
- Category: Diplomatic
