Demobilization and Disarmament. At war's end, the Imperial Japanese Army consisted of approximately 3,000,000 soldiers on duty to defend Japan from anticipated invasion. Naval and merchant ships were all but demolished in the oceans and seas and few planes escaped destruction in air fights or in kamikaze attacks on Allied ships. Japanese intelligence had guessed that the main invasion points would be in southern Kyushu and sent as many troops as it could spare to the scene in the summer of 1945 but could not provide full equipment and ammunition. Japanese women, as members of patriotic defense units, had been drilled to use, so we are told, outmoded weapons or bamboo spears if necessary to kill the enemy. Since the entry of the Soviet Union into the Pacific War and the U.S. resort to two atomic bombs in early August 1945 had persuaded the Japanese government to announce surrender, the entry of U.S. and Allied forces into Japan was largely peaceful, marred by some incidents of rape and fisticuffs.

Wasting little time after the formal surrender ceremony in Tokyo Bay, September 2, 1945, MacArthur's military staff began the process of demobilization and disarmament of armed forces within Japan, including the search, seizure, and destruction of weapons. The Ministries of War and Navy were disbanded. As replacements, the First and Second Demobilization Ministries were created to cooperate with the occupiers. Stations and trains were soon jammed and streets crowded with ex-soldiers on their way home, some of them high school and college students drafted in the final months of the war. Youth labor corps were also disbanded and returned to their families. Back home, however, what returnees often found instead of homes was wasteland and dead relatives. By December 1945, demobilization of the armed forces in Japan was almost complete. Possession by Japanese of swords, weapons, ammunition was forbidden. Although the Japanese Navy had been reduced to a skeleton, it was not entirely gone. A small group of coast guard ships remained in existence to patrol the coast, assist in minesweeping, and make weather reports.

Repatriation to Japan. By contrast, the repatriation of Japanese soldiers and civilians from the Japanese Empire and occupied territories after World War II was a gigantic operation. One estimate is that almost 7 million Japanese were overseas at the time of the emperor's recorded broadcast, August 15, 1945, ending the war and calling in effect for surrender, though the word was not used. More explicit orders to Japanese forces to surrender to Allied commanders were issued in following days. By September, General MacArthur's staff, in addition to domestic demobilization, was hard at work on elaborate plans for the evacuation of the Japanese overseas and the creation of debarkation points and reception centers. It was American policy to return Japanese back home as soon as possible both to break up the Japanese empire, as required by the Potsdam Declaration, and also to minimize the burden on local populations of supporting resident Japanese. According to U.S. intelligence records, approximately 3,500,000 soldiers and 3,100,000 civilians were abroad in China, Taiwan, Manchuria, Korea, Southeast Asia, Karufuto and the Kuriles, and the Pacific Islands. In China alone, the estimate was over 1,500,000 Japanese, both military and civilian. In North and South Korea, the figure was close to 940,000, including 700,000 civilians. In Southeast Asia, over 710,500. Whereas Japanese military personnel was overwhelmingly male, except for nurses, the overseas civilians included wives and children, government officials, businessmen, teachers and students, priests, secretaries and clerks, entertainers, and prostitutes. Thousands of Okinawan civilians were among those who were repatriated from the Marianas in the Central Pacific. A few stragglers remained hidden in the mountains and jungles of Southeast Asia for years, even decades, either refusing to believe that the war was over or that Japan had lost. One of the most famous was Onoda Hirō, who surrendered in the Philippines, 1974.

Reception Centers. At embarkation points in East and Southeast Asia, returning Japanese nationals were dusted with DDT or placed in temporary quarantine quarters. Civilians were allowed to carry only a limited amount of baggage and personal belongings. Transportation of repatriates was extremely difficult, owing to the huge loss of Japanese ships during the war. It was also dangerous since coastal waters were still mined. In late 1945, it became necessary for Occupation authorities to utilize American shipping facilities to ensure the rapid and efficient return of Japanese nationals. The Shipping Control Authority for the Japanese Merchant Marine (SCAJAP) was created, and eleven reception centers were set up to receive incoming Japanese. Among the busiest in 1946 was the port of Hakata near Fukuoka in Kyushu, where 4000 to 5000 Japanese arrived daily from Korea, including wives and children. Maizuru on the Sea of Japan coast of southwest Honshu (ninety miles from Kyoto) was an important point for Japanese fleeing Manchuria and China or, later, returning from labor camps in Siberia. Once at the reception centers, returnees were again sprayed with DDT for health and sanitation reasons, perhaps questioned, and given tickets to return to home places.

Reincorporation. Repatriation was not simply a matter of returning Japanese nationals back to Japan. Once home, they faced the difficulties of integration into an impoverished economy and disrupted society. Major responsibilities were turned over to Japanese authorities, in particular the Demobilization Bureaus and the Ministry of Welfare. For Japanese soldiers who had been Allied Prisoners of War, reception was uncertain. They were not seen as heroes in their local communities. Moreover, welcome home parades for veterans and celebration of heroic deeds were forbidden by the occupiers as were elaborate services for the dead. In addition, Occupation authorities censored poems, stories, and news items, which, in their eyes, reflected lingering ultranationalism, such as expressions of grief for the war dead. Though more fortunate veterans returned to work on farms and factories, there were not enough peacetime jobs for everyone in need. Provision for the social rehabilitation of veterans—or for the welfare of widows and children—was poor. Disabled war veterans were consigned to begging in train station and public places. Others became obsessed by memories of dead comrades. As soon as they could, veterans or surviving family members began making trips back to battlefields in order to retrieve bones or ashes of the dead and provide funeral rites—a search that continues to this day. For civilian repatriates born overseas, departure was especially sad. Japan to them was a foreign country, and adjustment was hard. They had lost homes, relatives, incomes, and professions and felt rejected as outsiders by local Japanese and relatives.

Among Japanese who returned safely from Manchuria (Manchukuo) were several who would become prominent in postwar Japanese politics and culture: avant garde novelist and playwright Abe Kobo, army veteran and film star Mifune Toshiro, and woman jazz pianist Akiyoshi Toshiko. Film and stage actress and future Diet representative Yamaguchi Yoshiko (known to Americans as Shirley Yamaguchi), was lucky to escape with her life from detention in China in 1946. Popular writer Hayashi Fumiko, at the time of her death in 1951, had just finished a novel, The Floating Clouds, in part based upon her own wartime sojourn in Borneo and return to Japan.

The Gulag. To add to Japan's misery, soon after the Soviet Union entered the war, an estimated one million Japanese, mainly military but including some civilian men and women, were taken from North Korea and Manchuria by invading Russian troops to forced labor camps in Siberia—the Gulag. This number, accepted for a long time, has recently been scaled down to three or four hundred thousand—still huge. Their return to Japan was delayed until 1947, when a small flow began. At the reception centers, Japanese and American intelligence authorities carefully screened Japanese repatriates from Siberia as possible converts to Communism or as potential spies in Japan for the Soviet Union. Families and veterans organizations engaged in numerous protests to Allied authorities and to the United Nations to speed the return of relatives remaining in captivity. Stories by returnees about life in the labor camps and cruel treatment at the hands of Russians began to appear in Japanese magazines and newspapers in late 1948 and 1949, before the official end of print censorship. At the end of the long process in 1955, three years after the end of the Occupation, tens of thousands of Japanese were still missing and would remain unaccounted for decades later.

Decolonization. In Japan's former empire and territories, local peoples joyously celebrated liberation from Japanese control and looked to the establishment of their own governments. They vented their anger against resident Japanese, engaging in looting, rape, and arson. Russian soldiers were particularly brutal in subjecting Japanese women to rape. In many cases, children had to be left behind with friendly Chinese. It was a bitter taste of what the Japanese army had done to local populations throughout East Asia during the Asia/Pacific War. Japanese military authorities, together with volunteer Japanese and local aid groups, did their best to keep order in the former empire until Allied Occupation forces arrived.

The Lost. Among the many who did not return were almost all of the perhaps 100,000 or more comfort women, mainly young Koreans but also other Asians and a few Caucasians. The vast majority had been forced or tricked into sexual service for the Japanese military, leading to replacement of such terms as “comfort women,” and “prostitutes” with “military sexual slaves.” The women who were placed close or near to the battlefront rarely survived. Others died from rough treatment and lack of food and medical attention. There was another group which did not make it home at this time, or later: children fathered by Japanese soldiers and local women; also children left in the care of sympathetic Chinese by fleeing parents. To this day, the children, now elderly, struggle with identity issues and search for Japanese relatives.

Repatriation from Japan. Another huge and reverse operation was underway—the return of hundreds of thousands of Koreans, Taiwanese, Chinese, and other foreign nationals from Japan to their home countries. Some Asian had served in the Japanese military, ostensibly as volunteers, but many more were laborers. Koreans were the largest Asian minority living in Japan, numbering from 1,700,000 to as many as 2 million. They had begun arriving to study or find work since the 1920s and 1930s, but were brought in much larger numbers to wartime Japan as forced laborers in mines and heavy industries. To complicate matters, war had reached the Korean homeland in the last weeks of the Pacific War when Soviet forces swept down from Manchuria. Soon the Korea was divided into North and South and occupied respectively by Soviet and American troops. In Occupied Japan, Koreans were in a quandary, wondering whether to stay or to return. Returnees to North and South Korea were severely limited as to the amount of personal belongings and currency they were allowed to carry. To make matters worse, life in liberated but chaotic North and South Korea was not what some had envisioned, leading to a desire to get back to Japan—if necessary, to smuggle their way in. Inside Japan, Korean groups formed with conflicting loyalties to the North or South. Resident Koreans faced discrimination in jobs, education, and housing, and suffered loss of legal rights under the 1947 Japanese Constitution.

Taiwanese and Chinese civilians had also been forcibly brought to Japan to labor in mines and factories. They too sought return (and later, would press for reparations). Once back in Taiwan, they faced another deadly invasion, this time from Nationalist Chinese fleeing the advance of Chinese Communists on the mainland. If they or mainland Chinese remained in Japan, they formed protective associations.

To challenge logistics, tens of thousands recently liberated American and Allied Prisoners of War and Civilian Internees joined the flow of returnees. As of 1944-45, most of Japan's POWs had been transferred from places of capture, the Philippines for example, to camps inside Japan where they were employed in heavy labor. Elsewhere, on the continent, several thousands were retained in camps in China, Manchuria, and Southeast Asia. MacArthur's command gave newly liberated and joyous POWs the highest priority for medical attention and transportation home. Among European returnees to Vietnam and Indonesia were former colonial administrators and civilians who refused to acknowledge that the Asia/Pacific War meant decolonization and the death knell, sooner or later, of Western empire in Asia.