Remember 8·15

The Fifteenth of August

1945·8·15

On this day, Japan announced its unconditional surrender.

81 years on · we have not forgotten

In memory of the Chinese dead of Imperial Japan’s war of aggression, 1931–1945, and of all who perished across Asia and the Pacific.

This Day

At noon on August 15, 1945, a recording of Emperor Hirohito reading the Imperial Rescript on the Termination of the War was broadcast: Japan accepted the Potsdam Declaration and surrendered unconditionally. Fourteen years of invasion that began with the seizure of China’s Northeast in 1931, and the full-scale war unleashed at the Marco Polo Bridge in 1937, were at an end.

On September 2, Japan’s representatives signed the Instrument of Surrender aboard USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay. The following day, September 3, is observed in China as Victory Day of the Chinese People’s War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression.

Victory was not an ending. For the tens of millions who died, and for the survivors and their descendants, this day brought liberation and, with it, the beginning of a long accounting.

Fourteen Years

  • Sept 18, 1931The Mukden Incident; Japan invades and occupies Northeast China.
  • July 7, 1937The Marco Polo Bridge Incident; full-scale invasion of China begins.
  • Dec 13, 1937Nanjing falls; a massacre lasting over six weeks begins.
  • From 1938Years of indiscriminate bombing of Chongqing and other cities.
  • c. 1940Unit 731’s human experiments and germ warfare; “Three Alls” campaigns in North China.
  • Dec 1941Pearl Harbor; the war engulfs the Pacific and Southeast Asia.
  • April 1942The Bataan Death March.
  • Aug 6 / 9, 1945Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
  • Aug 8, 1945The Soviet Union declares war on Japan and invades Northeast China the next day.
  • Aug 15, 1945Japan announces its unconditional surrender.
  • Sept 2, 1945The Instrument of Surrender is signed aboard USS Missouri.
  • 1946 — 1948The Tokyo Trials; seven Class-A war criminals, Tōjō Hideki among them, are hanged.

Crimes That Must Not Fade

What follows records only the most fully documented and widely known of the crimes of Japanese militarism. Behind every entry are countless individual lives.

I The Nanjing Massacre Dec 1937 — Jan 1938

After Nanjing fell, Japanese troops spent more than six weeks massacring civilians and disarmed soldiers amid mass rape, arson and looting. The International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE) found in its judgment that more than 200,000 people were killed; the Nanjing War Crimes Tribunal and the government of China put the toll at over 300,000. In 2015, the Documents of the Nanjing Massacre were inscribed on UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register.

II Unit 731 and Germ Warfare 1936 — 1945

At Pingfang near Harbin, Unit 731 of the Imperial Japanese Army performed frostbite experiments, vivisection and deliberate infection on living prisoners, whom it called maruta — “logs.” It spread plague and cholera against Ningbo, Changde and towns along the Zhejiang–Jiangxi railway, killing large numbers of civilians. After the war, the United States granted the unit’s leaders immunity in exchange for the experimental data; most never stood trial.

III Military Sexual Slavery (the “Comfort Women” System) 1932 — 1945

Across occupied China and Southeast Asia, and in colonies such as the Korean Peninsula, the Japanese military forced women into sexual slavery in its “comfort stations.” A 1996 United Nations report traced the first such stations to Shanghai in 1932 and named the system for what it was: sexual slavery. A 1998 United Nations report found that between 1932 and the end of the Second World War the Japanese government and army “forced over 200,000 women into sexual slavery in rape centres throughout Asia.” Survivors have spent their lives bearing witness, and those still living continue to demand formal apology and redress.

IV Indiscriminate Bombing and the “Three Alls” 1938 — 1944

For years Japan subjected Chongqing to indiscriminate strategic bombing; tens of thousands of civilians were killed or wounded, including the crowds who suffocated in the tunnel disaster of June 5, 1941. In North China, the “Three Alls” campaigns — kill all, burn all, loot all — depopulated whole districts and reduced countless villages to ash.

V Abuse of Prisoners and Forced Labor 1942 — 1945

Thousands of Filipino and American prisoners of war died of starvation, thirst and beatings, or were executed outright, on the Bataan Death March. According to the Japanese Foreign Ministry’s own wartime survey, 38,935 Chinese laborers were shipped to Japan for forced labor and 6,830 of them died there. At Hanaoka in Akita, the Chinese laborers rose up on June 30, 1945; the revolt was crushed and more than a hundred were tortured to death within three days, and of the 986 brought to Hanaoka, 418 died in Japan. Across occupied China, those pressed into forced labor were far more numerous still.

The Numbers

Numbers cannot hold the suffering. They must be remembered even so.

14 years
The war against Japan, 1931–1945
35,000,000+
Chinese killed or wounded (Chinese government figure)
300,000
Victims at Nanjing
81 years
Since the surrender

Note: the IMTFE judgment found more than 200,000 killed at Nanjing; the figure of over 300,000 comes from the Nanjing War Crimes Tribunal and the Chinese government. Sources are listed below.

Why We Remember

Remembrance is not the prolonging of hatred.

It is owed to the dead. It is the answer to those who deny or whitewash the war of aggression, and a guard against the return of militarism. Facing history honestly is the precondition of reconciliation — what we oppose is the crime and its concealment, never a people. In Japan, too, many scholars and citizens work to face this history squarely.

Remember the past, and it shall teach the future.
May the dead rest. May peace endure.

Records & Further Reading