by
Austin BayAugust 26, 2025
Sept. 2 marks the 80th anniversary of Japan's formal World War II surrender.
The capitulation was by design forceful and imposing, an absolutely made for Hollywood event -- as in Hollywood documentary news reels, visual mass media of the time.
Over 300 U.S. and allied ships crowded Tokyo Bay, wall-to-wall naval power, with the battleship USS Missouri serving as center stage for the surrender ceremony.
The ceremony sent a deserved but hard-earned message. Japan, the imperial nation that vowed its people would die for their emperor rather than submit to mongrel blood foreigners, was humbly surrendering to the "sleeping giant" its Pearl Harbor attack had awakened.
And the emperor had approved of the American terms -- after two atomic bombs and a factional war in Tokyo, the bitter ender young officers lost.
The mass media touch: Via live radio broadcast, a global audience heard reporters describe the surrender, the major Allied leaders deliver terms and Japanese leaders signal acceptances, instantaneously and unedited, somewhat like current White House diplomatic exchanges.
Gen. Douglas MacArthur and Adm. Chester Nimitz represented the Allies, but Gen. Jonathan Wainwright and Britain's Gen. Arthur Percival were also present. In 1942, Wainwright surrendered U.S. forces in the Philippines. That same year, Percival surrendered Singapore, Britain's supposedly impregnable Asian fortress. Japanese Foreign Minister Mamoru Shigemitsu led the defeated delegation.
For the record: As the ceremony ended, U.S. Navy carrier aircraft and a flight of U.S. Army Air Force B-29 Superfortresses passed over Tokyo Bay.
B-29s dropped the A-bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the devastation that ended Japanese resistance. When Donald Trump met Vladimir Putin on the tarmac in Alaska, a B-2 overflew the meet and greet. Similar message, different planes, different century. But very similar message about misjudging American power.
Eighty years later, the U.S. and Japan are close allies. Wealthy, hi-tech Japan -- a great ally with cash (the world's fourth largest economy). The U.S. and Japanese mutual defense commitments are bilateral but firm. An attack on Japan is an attack on the U.S. And vice versa.
Sure, Japan has problems. Japan produces young Japanese below the human replacement rate. Procreation has strategic consequences.
But Japan's location is another problem, perhaps a bigger problem.
Location is one reason Japan believes in missile defense -- North Korea routinely threatens Japan with nuclear attack, almost as often as Pyongyang threatens South Korea with atomic devastation.
Japan is also involved in two unresolved territorial disputes rooted in WWII. Both involved location -- and are the type of territorial disputes scholars sometimes refer to as "enduring."
Japan has maritime border and island disputes involving two different nuclear powers -- Russia and China.
Location. It's a gift and a problem.
Both disputes are WWII leftovers, unresolved by Tokyo Bay's pageantry.
As WWII ended, Soviet (Russian) forces occupied the northern Kurile Islands, between Japan and Siberia's Kamchatka Peninsula. The Kurile Islands have ethnic Japanese inhabitants. In 2012, Japan proposed paying Russia an indemnity and sharing maritime resources in exchange for control of the islands. Moscow's response: No dice. What we Russian's seize is ours. If this sounds like Russia's Ukraine position, it isn't coincidental.
The other island dispute with WWII echoes pits Japan against China. Communist China.
Located in the Pacific Ocean northeast of Taiwan and midway between China's coastline and the Japanese island of Okinawa, the Chinese dub the disputed micro-archipelago the Diaoyus. The Japanese call them the Senkakus.
All told, the Diaoyus/Senkakus have a surface area of 7 square kilometers. The islets are also uninhabited. Anyone claiming to be a Senkakuite is a fraud.
The Sino-Japanese struggle isn't over land mass or people. The seabed very likely has oil and gas deposits. Fishing rights are another conflict trigger.
National pride and strategic threat also drive the conflict. Japan is deeply worried about China's growing naval power. But terrible WWII history is another factor. China still resents, quite deeply, the 1937 Rape of Nanking by the Imperial Japanese Army. Tokyo Bay's peace treaty didn't settle that.