On August 1945, the Japanese government announced its acceptance of the Potsdam Proclamation. 15 August, Emperor Hirohito of Japan issued the "Imperial Decree" (Japanese: だぃとぅぁせんそぅしゅぅ) September.
On the Japanese side, Foreign Minister Shigemitsu Mamoru signed the surrender letter on behalf of the Japanese emperor and the Japanese government, and General Umezu Yoshijiro, chief of staff of the Japanese Imperial Army, signed the surrender letter on behalf of the Imperial Base Camp.
The victorious Allied Forces were signed by General MacArthur, General Nimitz, General Xu Yongchang, General Frith, General Drevyanko, General Bremen, Colonel Kosgei Lev, General leclerc, General Helfrich and General Ist.
There was also an episode in the process of signing. Colonel Cosgrove, the Canadian representative, accidentally signed his name at the signature place of the French representative on the next line when signing the Japanese depositary, so that the representatives of France and the Netherlands behind him could only sign with him, while the last New Zealand representative could only sign in the blank space at the bottom of the depositary. After the ceremony, the Dutch representative, General Helfrich, pointed out the wrong signature to Lieutenant General Sutherland, the US Chief of Staff. Shigemitsu Mamoru, the representative in Japan, also said that this wrongly signed document would not be approved by the National Assembly, so Lieutenant General Sutherland had to correct the field names of Canada, France, the Netherlands and New Zealand with a pen. Therefore, the Japanese version of the surrender was altered, and the place that should have been signed by the representative of Canada was blank.
The two surrender documents signed by countries in those years are now kept in the National Archives of the United States and the other in the Edo Tokyo Museum.