Japan signed the Japanese Instrument of Surrender in Tokyo Bay. The ceremony took place aboard USS Missouri, which was anchored in the bay on September 2, 1945.
Tokyo Bay was a practical and symbolic location. It lay close to the Japanese capital, while allowing a large Allied naval presence to demonstrate control of the surrounding waters. Japanese delegates traveled from Tokyo to Yokohama before boarding a small vessel that took them to Missouri.
The setting is sometimes mistakenly identified as Tokyo harbor, Pearl Harbor, or a Japanese city destroyed by atomic bombing. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were central to the final weeks of the war, but neither city hosted the surrender ceremony. Tokyo Bay was the site of the formal signing that completed Japan’s capitulation.