Japanese Instrument of Surrender

• 1. Introduction

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  The Japanese Instrument of Surrender was the printed agreement that ended World War II, signed on the deck of a warship anchored in Tokyo Bay just after nine o'clock in the morning on the 2nd of September 1945. Nine Allied nations put their names to the document alongside Japan's two reluctant signatories. At 9:25 a.m., the war was officially over. But the twenty-three-minute ceremony that made it happen was far stranger, more fraught, and more layered with meaning than any tidy ending might suggest. Who were the men who signed? How did the document nearly unravel over a signing error? And what became of the pens, the flags, and the paper itself in the decades that followed?

• 2. Finding Delegates

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  Japan's Higashikuni Cabinet faced a deeply uncomfortable task: choosing who would attend and sign. Prime Minister Higashikuni himself could not go, because he was a member of the Imperial family. Prince Fumimaro Konoe refused outright. It fell finally to Mamoru Shigemitsu and Yoshijiro Umezu to accept the Emperor's personal appeal and serve as the two signatories. Nine additional delegates were drawn from the Army, Navy, and Foreign Ministry, three from each. All eleven names were submitted to the Allies in advance, but only the two signatories' names were released to the press on the morning of the ceremony, for security reasons. The eleven delegates left Tokyo by car in the early hours of the 2nd of September, boarded a ship at Yokohama, and sailed out to the Missouri in the bay.

• 3. A Document Born in a Monastery Basement

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  General Douglas MacArthur's staff drew the assignment of drafting the Instrument of Surrender, led by Colonel LeGrande A. Diller. Manila in the war's aftermath offered few resources, and finding suitable paper for a document of this consequence was no small problem. A staff member solved it by discovering rare parchment in the basement of a monastery, and that paper was handed to MacArthur's printer. The Allied nations also had to negotiate who would sign and in what capacity. The United Kingdom invited British Dominion governments to attend as subordinates to its own delegation, but Australia pushed back and demanded to sign separately. MacArthur backed Australia's position. Australia, however, objected to MacArthur's suggestion that Canada, the Netherlands, and France should also sign the document separately.

• 4. Twenty-Three Minutes

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  Shigemitsu signed first, at 9:04 a.m., signing "By Command and in behalf of the Emperor of Japan and the Japanese Government." Umezu, Chief of the Army General Staff, followed at 9:06 a.m., signing "By Command and in behalf of the Japanese Imperial General Headquarters." MacArthur accepted the surrender at 9:08 a.m. on behalf of the Allied Powers, in his capacity as Supreme Commander. Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz signed for the United States at 9:12 a.m. Representatives of China, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, Australia, Canada, France, the Netherlands, and New Zealand followed in sequence, with Air Vice-Marshal Leonard M. Isitt of New Zealand closing the Allied signatures at 9:22 a.m. MacArthur made brief concluding remarks, and the war ended three minutes later.

• 5. The Flags and Their Stories

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  The Missouri's deck held two American flags for the ceremony, and a widely circulated story claimed that one had flown over the White House on the day of the attack on Pearl Harbor. Captain Stuart Murray of the Missouri firmly disputed this. He later explained that the flags were standard-issue ship's colors pulled from the spares, probably acquired in Guam in May, with no special history. Murray said those who claimed otherwise were, in his phrase, "hard up for baloney." He noted that both flags were turned in to the Naval Academy Museum on the ship's return to the East Coast in October. The flag that did carry genuine weight was something else entirely: a flag that Commodore Matthew Perry had flown on his ship in 1853-54, when he led the U.S. Navy's Far East Squadron into Tokyo Bay to force the opening of Japan's ports. It was flown out from the Naval Academy Museum in its glass case by an officer messenger and displayed on the surrender deck facing forward, visible to everyone present. Photographs of the ceremony show the flag mounted with its reverse side showing, stars in the upper right corner. This was not an error. The flag's cloth had become so fragile that a protective backing had been sewn onto it, and the conservator had directed that this was the safest way to present it, leaving the wrong side visible. A replica of Perry's 31-star flag can be seen today on the Surrender Deck of the Battleship Missouri Memorial in Pearl Harbor.

• 6. The Signing Error

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  Colonel Lawrence Moore Cosgrave, signing for Canada, placed his signature on the Japanese copy in the wrong position, one line below his intended line. This was attributed to an injury Cosgrave had sustained in World War I that left him blind in one eye. The misplacement forced every Allied signatory after him to sign one line below the intended line as well, creating a discrepancy between the two copies of the document. When the error was pointed out to General Richard K. Sutherland, he crossed out the pre-printed nation titles on the Japanese copy and rewrote them by hand in the correct relative positions. The Japanese delegation initially found the handwritten alterations unacceptable, and the signing's legal integrity seemed at risk. Sutherland resolved this by initialing each alteration individually, treating each initial as an abbreviated signature. The Japanese representatives did not complain further.

• 7. The Pens

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  MacArthur signed the Instrument with six pens. As witnesses to Japan's defeat, American General Jonathan Wainwright, who had surrendered the Philippines, and British Lieutenant-General Arthur Percival, who had surrendered Singapore, each received one of those pens. Wainwright's pen went to the West Point Museum at the United States Military Academy. Percival's pen went to the Cheshire Military Museum. A third pen, belonging to MacArthur's aide Courtney Whitney, was used by MacArthur and returned to Whitney; the Whitney family still owns it. The last pen was bright red and went to MacArthur's wife; it was later stolen from her. MacArthur left two black pens on the table for the other signatories to use if they wished. British signatory Admiral Bruce Fraser used both and then, in an echo of MacArthur's gesture, tried to give them to his own witnesses. MacArthur's aides retrieved the pens immediately afterward and returned them to MacArthur. American General Jimmy Doolittle reportedly whispered to those around him, "I see the British are still lend-leasing our equipment." Both black Waterman pens are now at the MacArthur Memorial. Nimitz signed with two pens; the one belonging to his Chinese neighbor and close friend is now in the Nanjing Museum in Nanjing, China, while the other is at the United States Naval Academy Museum.

• 8. Where the Document Went

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  On the 6th of September, Colonel Bernard Theilen carried the Allied copy of the Instrument to Washington, D.C., along with Hirohito's the 15th of August rescript and the full powers credentials for Shigemitsu and Umezu, all three stamped with the State Seal of Japan. He presented them to President Harry S. Truman in a formal White House ceremony the following day. The documents were then exhibited at the National Archives alongside regional surrender instruments signed afterward in the Philippines on September 3, in Korea on September 9, and in South-east Asia on September 12. On the 1st of October 1945, the documents were formally accessioned into the National Archives collection. They remain in the National Archives Building in Washington, D.C. The Japanese copy traveled a different path, now held at the Diplomatic Archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan in Tokyo. It was last displayed publicly in 2015, during an exhibition marking the 70th anniversary of the signing. MacArthur ordered eleven full-sized watermarked facsimiles bound in blue leather for distribution to the Allied nations, then additional copies in red leather for his personal guests at the ceremony. Two of those personal facsimiles, given to Colonel LeGrande A. Diller and Filipino Major General Basilio Valdes, were bought in the late 20th century by Kenneth W. Rendell for the International Museum of World War II in Natick, Massachusetts.