On September 2nd 1945, on the deck of the battleship USS Missouri, the Japanese Empire

formerly and unconditionally surrendered.

With that, the Second World War was over, and everyone stopped fighting, went home, and lived

happily ever after.

Except not everyone.

There were a surprisingly large number of holdouts who either didn't know that Japan surrendered or didn't believe it.

Learn more about the Japanese soldiers who never surrendered on this episode of

everything everywhere daily. The Japanese Empire and its height was pretty big.

At its peak in 1942, it encompassed 7.4 million square kilometers or 2.9 million square miles.

Almost all of East Asia and Southeast Asia were under Japanese

control. In addition to major cities like Manila, Singapore, Hong Kong, and

Jakarta, this included a large number of small islands and remote areas.

There were thousands of Japanese soldiers who were stationed in these remote outposts.

As the war wore on, Americans didn't bother to try and conquer every single outpost and capture every Japanese soldier.

They would often bypass islands, knowing that if they could capture strategic islands, the Japanese

they skipped couldn't be supplied or evacuated.

As the war dragged on by August of 1945 the Americans were

on the doorstep of mainland Japan. The Soviets had entered the war, the British

having finished up against Germany were on the way, as were potentially hundreds of thousands

of troops from Europe.

With all of this and the detonation of two atomic bombs, the Japanese Emperor

Hirohito decided to surrender unconditionally. On August 15th he addressed the Japanese

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