August 14: Japan Surrenders

The Emperor of Japan surrendered to the United States on this date in 1945, initiating a formal process of surrender that brought a final end to World War II within two weeks. Despite its alliance with Nazi Germany and its killing of millions of Chinese and other peoples, Japan was one of the world’s only countries where Jews fleeing Nazi genocide could actually find refuge, with several thousand Jews able to enter the country from Lithuania. Chiune Sugihara, the head officer of the Japanese consulate in Lithuania, issued several thousand passports to Jews and may have saved as many as 10,000 lives. Among the refugees were 500 students, rabbis and family members of the yeshiva of Mir, the only European yeshiva to remain intact throughout the Holocaust, according to historians Daniel Ari Kapner and Stephen Levine. Jews who did not successfully transit to the U.S. or Canada mostly ended up in Japanese-occupied Shanghai, and the Japanese government resisted repeated Nazi requests for the extermination of the Jews in the Shanghai ghetto.

“I am the man responsible for the alliance with Hitler, but nowhere have I promised that we would carry out his anti-Semitic policies in Japan. This is not simply my personal opinion, it is the opinion of Japan, and I have no compunction about announcing it to the world.” —Foreign Minister Matsuoka Yoshuke, 1940; he died during his war crimes trial in 1946

See our editorial board’s reflections on the 65th anniversary of the end of the war here.