The Japanese surrender in China

On 9 September 1945, in the auditorium of the Central Military Academy in Nanjing, General Yasuji Okamura, commander of Japan’s China Expeditionary Army, signed the instrument of surrender of the Japanese forces in China. It was accepted on behalf of Chiang Kai-shek, Supreme Commander of the Allied China Theatre, by General He Yingqin, Chief of the General Staff and commander of the Chinese ground forces. According to Chinese accounts, the ceremony began at 9 a.m. and lasted a quarter of an hour or so. On the same day in Seoul the Governor-General of Korea, General Nobuyuki Abe, surrendered to the Americans.

Nanjing was not chosen by chance. In December 1937, after the Battle of Nanjing, Japanese troops had perpetrated the Nanjing Massacre here, and from 1940 the city had been the seat of the collaborationist Wang Jingwei government. More than eight years had passed since the Marco Polo Bridge Incident, which in July 1937 had opened full-scale war.

From Zhijiang to Nanjing

Japan’s formal surrender had taken place a week earlier, on 2 September aboard the battleship Missouri. To whom each Japanese army was to surrender was settled by General Order No. 1, approved on 17 August: the forces in China (excluding Manchuria), on Taiwan and in French Indochina north of the 16th parallel were to surrender to Chiang Kai-shek. Manchuria fell to the Red Army, to which the Kwantung Army had laid down its arms in the second half of August.

Preparations began in August. On 15 August Chiang Kai-shek demanded that Okamura send representatives to receive instructions. On 21 August a delegation headed by the deputy chief of staff of the China Expeditionary Army, Major General Takeo Imai, flew into the airfield at Zhijiang in Hunan province – a place that only a few months earlier had been the scene of heavy fighting during the Japanese retreat in China. There it received Memorandum No. 1, setting out how the Japanese forces were to prepare for the surrender. At the end of August an advanced headquarters of the Chinese ground forces began operating in Nanjing. The ceremony was originally planned for 5 September but was postponed by four days.

The date of 9 September carried symbolic meaning. According to Chinese accounts, the ninth hour of the ninth day of the ninth month was chosen – in the manner of the armistice of 11 November 1918 – and also because the Chinese word for “nine” (jiu) sounds the same as the word meaning “lasting”, which was to augur a lasting peace.

The ceremony

Okamura signed the document, drawn up in Chinese and Japanese, after which his chief of staff, Lieutenant General Asasaburō Kobayashi, handed it to He Yingqin. According to Chinese figures, more than a thousand guests had gathered in the hall, among them Allied officers and journalists.

The occasion also had a personal dimension. The same two men had faced each other twelve years earlier, in an entirely different balance of power. Okamura, then deputy chief of staff of the Kwantung Army, had negotiated the Tanggu Truce in May 1933, which gave the Japanese control of a strip of northern China south of the Great Wall, and the Chinese side had at that time been led by none other than He Yingqin, as head of the Beiping branch of the Military Affairs Commission. In 1935 He had also had to accept Japanese demands concerning Hebei province, known as the He–Umezu Agreement. In Nanjing the roles were reversed.

Okamura himself was one of the most experienced Japanese commanders in China. In 1941–1944 he commanded the North China Area Army, which conducted ruthless operations against the communist guerrillas – Chinese historians link them to the so-called “Three Alls” policy (kill all, burn all, loot all). In November 1944, after Operation Ichi-Go, he took command of the entire China Expeditionary Army.

The surrender at Nanjing covered an army which, unlike the Japanese forces in the Pacific, had not been defeated. Estimates of its strength range from around 1.05 million to around 1.3 million men, depending on whether the units on Taiwan and in northern Indochina are included. The following day Okamura assured He Yingqin that his troops would henceforth carry out Chinese orders. The surrender area was divided into a dozen or so zones in which individual Chinese commanders received the surrender of arms; in Beijing the formal surrender took place on 10 October in the Forbidden City.

Seoul, the same day

On the same day Japanese rule in Korea came to an end. The American XXIV Corps of Lieutenant General John R. Hodge, brought over from Okinawa, began landing at Incheon on 8 September, and on 9 September, in the Government-General Building in Seoul, the ceremony of surrender of the Japanese forces in Korea south of the 38th parallel took place. On the Japanese side it was signed by the last Governor-General of Korea, General Nobuyuki Abe – prime minister of Japan in 1939–1940 – and by the army and navy commanders in Korea. The surrender was accepted by Hodge and by the commander of the Seventh Fleet, Admiral Thomas Kinkaid. After the ceremony the Japanese flag was lowered from the flagpole in front of the building and the American flag was raised in its place.

For the Koreans it was the end of 35 years of Japanese rule, but it did not yet mean independence. According to historians, the Koreans were not invited to take part in the ceremony, and in the first days the American command left Japanese officials in their posts, which caused outrage in Seoul; Abe was removed a few days later. North of the 38th parallel the Red Army was already in control. The line drawn in August as a temporary boundary between surrender zones eventually became the border between two Korean states.

Without the communists

The Chinese Communist Party was not represented at Nanjing, even though its forces had been fighting the Japanese since 1937 and controlled extensive “liberated areas” behind the front. As early as 15 August Zhu De had demanded that Okamura surrender to communist commanders, and the communists pressed the Allies for a share in accepting the surrender. The government in Chongqing, backed by the Americans, rejected these demands, and Okamura recognised only Chiang Kai-shek; in many places his garrisons held out against the communists until government troops arrived. This race – and the first clashes in Shanxi – marked the beginning of the clashes between communists and nationalists in China. On the day of the Nanjing ceremony Mao Zedong was in Chongqing, where since the end of August he had been holding talks with Chiang Kai-shek.

What was at stake above all was weaponry. Whoever took over the Japanese depots, rifles and artillery strengthened his hand for the reckoning to come. The Americans moved government troops by air and sea to Shanghai, Nanjing and Beijing, and from 30 September their Marines were landing in northern China. The communists took over the weapons of smaller garrisons and collaborationist units, and in Manchuria – according to many historians – they made use of the Kwantung Army’s arms that had fallen into Soviet hands, even though in the Sino-Soviet Treaty of 14 August Moscow had undertaken to support only Chiang Kai-shek’s government. Some Japanese soldiers, moreover, remained under arms on the nationalist side; in Shanxi, according to various sources, more than two thousand of them were incorporated into his forces by Yan Xishan.

Taiwan and northern Indochina

The Nanjing surrender did not cover all the areas assigned to Chiang Kai-shek. The forces on Taiwan and in northern Indochina were not subordinate to Okamura, as the Japanese delegation had already pointed out at Zhijiang. In Hanoi, where on 2 September Hồ Chí Minh had proclaimed the independence of Vietnam, the surrender was accepted on 28 September by the Chinese troops of General Lu Han. On Taiwan, Japanese since 1895, the last Governor-General, Rikichi Andō, surrendered on 25 October in Taipei to the representative of the Chinese government, Chen Yi; the authorities of the Republic of China proclaimed that day the day of the island’s return to China.

Repatriation

After the surrender, according to Japanese figures, some 1.5 million Japanese – soldiers and civilians – remained in China proper, and a further two million in Manchuria. Their return home took months. The soldiers were disarmed and gathered in camps, the civilians in guarded districts; transport was provided largely by American ships. Most of those in China proper had returned to Japan by the summer of 1946. From Manchuria, repatriation through the port of Huludao lasted from 1946 to 1948 and covered more than a million people; many soldiers of the Kwantung Army, by contrast, were deported to Soviet labour camps.

What came of it

The Nanjing ceremony closed the Sino-Japanese War, in which – according to historians’ estimates – anywhere from well over ten million to more than twenty million Chinese died, most of them civilians. It did not, however, bring China peace. The race for the surrender and for Japanese weapons turned into a civil war which flared up on a full scale in 1946 and ended in 1949 with the communists’ victory.

Okamura’s fate illustrates this tangle well. The communists put him on their list of major war criminals, but Chiang Kai-shek’s government kept him in Nanjing as coordinator of the repatriation and as a valued adviser in the struggle against the communists. In January 1949 a tribunal in Shanghai acquitted him of war crimes; immediately afterwards Okamura returned to Japan. The decision was criticised – including by some Chinese historians – as dictated more by the needs of the civil war than by an assessment of his responsibility. He died in 1966. He Yingqin served for a few months in 1949 as prime minister and then left for Taiwan with the government.