Off the top of my head I can’t recall any unit or garrison surrenders by Japanese forces during WW II. A search didn’t turn up any during the war - of course I found quite a few after 8-15-45.
There were relatively few Japanese POWs, and I’ve gathered that most were captured individually. Were there any unit or garrison surrenders during the hostilities?
As far as I know, until the very final days of the war, there were no garrison surrenders. Very few Japanese prisoners were taken until the Okinawa campaign. Although I did hear that there was a mass POW escape from a camp in Australia, although how the came by a mass of prisoners without anybody surrendering is beyond me
I thought that Bill Slim extracted a few small-unit surrenders in CBI, but upon quickly reexamining Defeat Into Victory I find no reference, and in fact find much to the contrary. When the surrender ceremony was delayed, the Japanese troops in CBI suffered much privation for two weeks until September 2 in order to not surrender. In fact, it seems that the Japanese in CBI were even less inclined to give up because unlike the Pacific, CBI offered more opportunity, however hopeless, to get away.
American infantry and Marines had particularly elephantine memories when it came to the surrender of the Japanese. Apparently there was a series of false-surrender incidents, some real, others perhaps merely rumor, that became legend among American troops in Guadalcanal in 1942 and stayed with the troops until the end of the war. Therefore, few offers to surrender were accepted, and total prisoners taken in the Pacific before Okinawa and the official surrender probably number only in the few thousands. Ronald Spector hints that such practices were encouraged at least tacitly by higher leadership.
It’s also worth mentioning that Americans also took very few German SS prisoners once word of executions of Americans on the part of the SS filtered back to the troops. Particularly hated–and according to Stephen Ambrose and others, on occasion murdered–were members of the 12th SS Panzer Hitler Jugend, who were mostly adolescents and considered mere kids even by the eighteen-year old American troops who fought them. Regular German tankers, who also wore black uniforms, sometimes mistakenly received the same treatment. Just goes to show that the animosity in the Pacific wasn’t exclusively drawn along the lines of racialism and dehumanization.
But there is always an exception. I’ll try to find it for you.