The captain had his sailors strap mop handles to their legs and practice walking.

Captain Stuart Murray of USS Missouri wanted his crew to move in formation without awkwardness behind Japan's Foreign Minister, Mamoru Shigemitsu, who had lost his leg to a Korean nationalist's bomb in Shanghai in 1932 and now walked with a prosthetic and a cane. Murray had choreographed every aspect of the ceremony scheduled for the morning of September 2, 1945. He would not allow a stumble, an overlong pause, or any gesture that might shade the proceedings toward humiliation. Whatever else this day was, it would not be that.

At 9:02 a.m., the signing began.

Shigemitsu — 58 years old, in a black top hat and formal morning coat — signed first on behalf of the Japanese government and Emperor Hirohito. General Yoshijirō Umezu, 63, signed for the Japanese armed forces. Then General Douglas MacArthur, 65, took six pens and signed his name as Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers. He gave one pen each to Lieutenant General Jonathan Wainwright, who had surrendered the Philippines at Corregidor, and Lieutenant General Arthur Percival, who had surrendered Singapore — two men he had personally invited to stand behind him, their gaunt frames from years of Japanese captivity making any speech about the cost of war unnecessary. The remaining pens went to West Point, to the National Archives, and MacArthur kept one himself.

Two hundred and fifty Allied warships lay at anchor in Tokyo Bay. The ceremony lasted 23 minutes.

Japanese foreign ministry official Toshikazu Kase, who witnessed the signing, later wrote: "The narrow quarterdeck was now transformed into an altar of peace." He described the men around him standing "in the open sunlight as if in a dream."

MacArthur's closing words were: "Let us pray that peace be now restored to the world and that God will preserve it always. These proceedings are closed."

He had displayed, on the Missouri's rail, the original 31-star flag that Commodore Matthew Perry had flown in 1853 when he sailed into this same bay and forced Japan to open its ports to the world. The 旭日旗 (Kyokujitsuki) — rising sun flag — of Japan's military lay furled below. Ninety-two years between forced opening and final closing, in the same stretch of water.

What may matter most is what happened to the swords.

Allied policy required all Japanese military officers to surrender their blades. The first formal sword surrender came on August 27, 1945, days before the Missouri ceremony, when Japanese naval officers boarded USS Nicholas and unbuckled their 軍刀 (guntō) — military swords — and handed them across. Across Southeast Asia over the weeks that followed, approximately 5,500 swords were collected and inventoried at the US 8th Army Weapons Depot at 赤羽 (Akabane) in northern Tokyo. Many had been in families for generations, passed from samurai grandfather to imperial officer grandson. Officers had carried them into Guadalcanal and Rabaul and Burma — deliberately, consciously, as a link to the warrior tradition.

The 刀 (katana) had long been called the 魂 (tamashii) — the soul — of the samurai. The 武士道 (bushidō) code that the imperial military had appropriated and amplified taught that surrendering was a fate worse than death; 降伏 (kōfuku) — capitulation — was the ultimate humiliation for a warrior. The men who unbuckled their swords on those decks had trained their whole lives in a culture built on that premise.

Most of the Akabane swords were shipped to the United Kingdom and United States as war trophies, given away, or destroyed. MacArthur later made an exemption for blades of recognized artistic and cultural value — a concession to the Sword Preservation Society, which argued that museum-quality 日本刀 (Nihontō) were national artifacts, not weapons. Some were returned. Most were not.

The samurai class had been officially dissolved in 1876, when the 廃刀令 (Haitōrei) edict prohibited sword-wearing in public. The conscripted army that fought the Second World War was not composed of samurai. But its officers had deliberately clothed themselves in samurai symbolism — the swords, the 武士道 (bushidō) rhetoric, the death-before-surrender ethos — and understood themselves as heirs to that tradition.

On September 2, 1945, that unbroken symbolic chain — running from the warriors of the 鎌倉 (Kamakura) period through the 戦国 (Sengoku) warlords through the 江戸 (Edo) peacetime samurai through the imperial officer corps — finally snapped. It snapped quietly, bureaucratically, in a 23-minute ceremony on a ship's quarterdeck, followed by 5,500 receipts for surrendered swords.