Who was the first Japanese representative to sign the 1945 surrender document?

Mamoru Shigemitsu was the first Japanese representative to sign the 1945 surrender document.

Shigemitsu was Japan’s foreign minister in the government that accepted the Allied terms. At the ceremony aboard USS Missouri, he signed “by command and in behalf of the Emperor of Japan and the Japanese Government.” His signature was followed by that of General Yoshijiro Umezu.

Umezu signed for Imperial General Headquarters, representing the Japanese military command. The distinction between the two signatures reflected Japan’s constitutional and military structures at the end of the war. Eleven Japanese delegates attended, but only Shigemitsu and Umezu signed the instrument itself.

Shigemitsu had previously served as a diplomat and had lost a leg in an assassination attempt in Shanghai in 1932. After the surrender ceremony, he became one of the Japanese defendants tried at the International Military Tribunal for the Far East. He was convicted of war crimes, imprisoned, and later returned to Japanese politics.