Several years ago, when then-U.S. President Barack Obama was asked his thoughts on the notion of American exceptionalism, his reply was tepid: “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.” In other words, America’s greatness is not so much an empirical fact, but rather a debatable construct based upon one’s perspective. Most nations have aspects about them that should make their citizens proud. Yet the formal Japanese surrender ceremony held on September 2, 1945 on the deck of the battleship USS Missouri should serve as a reminder that, perhaps, the president understated the true greatness of the nation he led.
To understand just what a momentous occasion this was, we must first remember the context of this sublime gathering in Tokyo Bay. Japan had been among the cruelest of conquerors, butchering millions while justifying their rampage of gore with the premise that they were a chosen people, whose emperor was a living god and that the Japanese islands were formed by golden drops from the point of a heavenly being’s sword. Indeed, as historian Victor Davis Hanson has pointed out, the war in the Pacific could be summed up as Japanese soldiers killing Asian civilians, be they among the 200,000 slaughtered Chinese in the Rape of Nanking in 1938, the over 100,000 Filipinos murdered in Manila in 1945, or the Japan’s countless victims in between.
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