Surrender, Occupation & Repatriation

This theme covers places connected with the end of the war and its aftermath: where surrender was decided and signed, the headquarters and courts of the Allied occupation, and the ports through which millions of Japanese were repatriated. It runs from August 1945 into the 1950s, the transition between wartime and postwar Japan.

Japan accepted the Potsdam Declaration on August 14, 1945, and the decision was announced to the nation at noon the next day in the Emperor's recorded broadcast. General MacArthur, the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, landed at Atsugi on August 30, and the Instrument of Surrender was signed aboard USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay on September 2. GHQ/SCAP, housed in the Dai-Ichi Life Building at Hibiya, ruled indirectly through the Japanese government; the Allied occupation that followed dismantled the armed forces and tried war criminals, purged officials, dissolved the zaibatsu, carried out land reform and directed the drafting of the Constitution of Japan, in force from 1947. The International Military Tribunal for the Far East opened at Ichigaya in May 1946 and delivered judgment in November 1948; Tōjō Hideki and six others were hanged on December 23. Class B and C trials were held at Yokohama, Manila, Singapore and elsewhere in Asia. As the Cold War deepened, occupation policy shifted from about 1948 towards economic recovery. Japan regained sovereignty when the San Francisco Peace Treaty took effect on April 28, 1952, though Okinawa remained under U.S. administration until 1972.

Some 6.6 million Japanese soldiers and civilians were overseas at the defeat. Their return (hikiage) from Manchuria, Korea, China, Taiwan, Southeast Asia and the Pacific passed through ports such as Hakata, Sasebo (Uragashira), Maizuru, Senzaki and Uraga. In Soviet-occupied Manchuria, northern Korea and southern Sakhalin, civilian deaths in flight and the children left behind were especially grave problems; about 575,000 Japanese servicemen and others were taken to Siberia and elsewhere in the Soviet Union for internment and forced labour, of whom Japan's Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare estimates about 55,000 died. Maizuru received repatriation ships until 1958. Meanwhile Koreans, Chinese and Taiwanese who had been in Japan during the war moved in the opposite direction or chose to remain, the starting point of the postwar question of foreign residents.

Under this theme visitors will find places associated with the decision to end the war and the signing of the surrender, buildings requisitioned by the occupation forces, the war crimes courtrooms and the site of Sugamo Prison, landing piers and quarantine-station remains at the repatriation ports, and museums such as the Maizuru Repatriation Memorial Museum and the Uragashira Repatriation Memorial Peace Park.