Preparing the actual document fell to General Douglas MacArthur's staff in war-torn Manila, led by Colonel LeGrande A. Diller. Resources were scarce, but an enterprising staff member discovered rare parchment in the basement of a monastery, and the printer went to work. The diplomatic choreography was equally improvised. The United Kingdom wanted its Dominions to sign as subordinates, but MacArthur backed Australia's demand to sign independently. On the Japanese side, finding delegates willing to perform the task proved agonizing. Prime Minister Higashikuni, as a member of the Imperial family, could not attend. Prince Fumimaro Konoe flatly refused. It took a personal appeal from Emperor Hirohito himself to convince Foreign Minister Mamoru Shigemitsu and General Yoshijiro Umezu to accept the assignment. On the morning of September 2, the eleven Japanese delegates left Tokyo by car, boarded a destroyer at Yokohama, and sailed out to the Missouri.

At 9:04 a.m., Shigemitsu signed for the Japanese government. At 9:06, General Umezu signed on behalf of Imperial General Headquarters. Then came the Allied signatures in rapid succession: Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz for the United States at 9:12, followed by representatives of China, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, Australia, Canada, France, the Netherlands, and New Zealand. The last Allied signature landed at 9:22 a.m. Nine nations, sixteen minutes. Overhead, the sky filled with a massive formation of American aircraft celebrating the moment. On the deck below, two U.S. flags hung as witnesses. One was an ordinary service flag. The other was nearly a century old -- a 31-star flag that had flown from Commodore Matthew Perry's flagship when he sailed into this same bay in 1853 to force Japan's ports open to foreign trade. The flag's cloth was so fragile that conservators had sewn a protective backing onto it, leaving the reverse side visible. Perry's banner hung backward, stars in the upper right corner, presiding over the end of a war that had reshaped the world Perry helped open.

The pens scattered across the world like relics from a new kind of altar. Wainwright's went to the West Point Museum. Percival's ended up at the Cheshire Military Museum in England. One of Nimitz's two pens had belonged to his Chinese neighbor and close friend, and it traveled to the Nanjing Museum in China. The other rests at the United States Naval Academy Museum. MacArthur's aide Courtney Whitney's pen, used by MacArthur and returned afterward, stayed in the Whitney family. The bright red Parker pen that went to MacArthur's wife was later stolen. The two black Waterman pens that Fraser's aides briefly pocketed now sit at the MacArthur Memorial in Norfolk, Virginia. Each pen carried the weight of what it signed: the formal end of a conflict that killed an estimated 70 to 85 million people.

Four days after the ceremony, Colonel Bernard Theilen flew the Allied copy of the Instrument to Washington, D.C., along with a copy of Emperor Hirohito's August 15 surrender rescript and the full powers credentials for Shigemitsu and Umezu, all stamped with the State Seal of Japan. The documents went on display at the National Archives on October 1, 1945, alongside regional surrender instruments signed in the Philippines, Korea, and Southeast Asia in the days following the Missouri ceremony. MacArthur ordered eleven full-sized watermarked facsimiles bound in blue leather for distribution among the Allied nations. The Japanese copy resides at the Diplomatic Archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Tokyo, last publicly displayed in 2015 for the 70th anniversary. A replica sits at the Edo-Tokyo Museum. The Missouri herself became a museum, permanently moored at Pearl Harbor, where a plaque in the teak deck marks the exact spot where the signatures ended a world war.

The bay where the Missouri anchored on that September morning remains one of the busiest waterways in Japan, ringed by the sprawl of Yokohama and Tokyo. The exact coordinates -- 35.35 degrees north, 139.76 degrees east -- place the signing somewhere in the waters between Yokohama's commercial port and the industrial coast. No permanent marker floats at the spot. The event lives instead in the objects it scattered: pens in museums on three continents, documents under glass in Washington and Tokyo, a flag back in its case at the Naval Academy in Annapolis, and a battleship at rest in Hawaii. The ceremony lasted twenty minutes. Its artifacts have been traveling for eighty years.