This talk begins with a consideration of Japan’s surrender in China on September 9, 1945, in order to question the appropriateness of 1945 as the end date of WWII in Asia. The talk then considers the implications for our understandings of WWII in Asia of seeing 1945 not as an end-date but a mid point in a connected series of events that ended with the victory of the Chinese Communists in 1949. We will end with an initial consideration of wartime everydayness: what was the war like away from the battlefield as people constructed new normals?