On Sept. 2, 80 years will have passed since representatives of Japan and the Allied powers signed an agreement formalizing the end of World War II aboard the USS Missouri. That document formalized Japan’s surrender and initiated a postwar occupation that would last for seven years.

The goal of the Occupation: reform Japan into a country that would never again wage a war of aggression, and one that would espouse the values enshrined in the recently signed U.N. charter.

The success of the Occupation was not a foregone conclusion, and it is something that has intrigued me ever since I was a child. With a middle name like MacArthur, I suppose it was inevitable that I would wonder why my Japanese great-grandmother would tell her half-American grandson — my father— how Gen. Douglas MacArthur and the Allied powers helped rebuild a new Japan. But more importantly, I always wondered, how is it that bitter enemies could find peace with one another? Why was the Allied Occupation so successful?

Nearly 20 years ago, I asked my grandparents these questions. And on the 80th anniversary of the war’s end this year, I reread their responses just like I do every year around this time. With wars raging around the globe and peace agreements seemingly as tenuous as ever, their insights and perspectives seem ever relevant today.

Michael A. Bosack, pictured here in the 1940s, served in the U.S. Army during World War II and was among the first troops to arrive in Yokohama for the Allied Occupation of Japan. | COURTESY OF MICHAEL MACARTHUR BOSACK

My grandparents were ordinary people who lived through extraordinary times. My grandfather, Michael A. Bosack, was a young New Yorker when he was drafted into the military. At 16 years old, he wanted to gain full-time employment but could not owing to his age. He forged a birth certificate to claim that he was 18, which in turn made him eligible for the draft. So off he went to the U.S. Army and the “Big War,” as many called it at the time.

He eventually ended up in the Philippines, which is where he fought the Imperial Japanese A