[Kobi]

Today is Victory Day in my home state of Rhode Island.

Victory Day, or VJ Day, commemorates the anniversary of Japan’s surrender to the Allies in 1945, ending World War II. The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima on August 6 and Nagasaki on August 9, and the Soviet Union’s invasion of Manchuria in the previous week made the surrender inevitable. President Harry S Truman’s announcement of the surrender set off street celebrations from coast to coast in the United States. The official end of the war did not occur until September 2, 1945, when General Douglas MacArthur accepted the Japanese surrender from General Yoshijiro Umezu aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay.

President Truman declared September 2 as the official VJ Day in 1945. In the newspapers across world that day, there were hundreds of photos of soldiers and civilians rejoicing together.

VJ Day is a legal state holiday only in the state of Rhode Island. Rhode Island has celebrated this day since 1948.

This day is not without controversy tho. As per Wikipedia:

Although September 2 is the designated V-J Day in the entire United States, the event is recognized as an official holiday only in the U.S. state of Rhode Island, where the holiday's official name is "Victory Day",[16] and it is observed on the second Monday of August. There have been several attempts in the 1980s and 1990s to eliminate or rename the holiday on the grounds that it is discriminatory. While those all failed, the state legislature did pass a resolution in 1990 "stating that Victory Day is not a day to express satisfaction in the destruction and death caused by nuclear bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki."[17]

Here is an article in the local paper about the day thru the eyes of a soldier who was there: http://www.projo.com/news/content/VI...v16.41447.html