When the 77th Division of the 9th Army Corps landed in Hakodate, Hokkaido, on Oct. 4, 1945, it began a low-key U.S. presence in Japan's northernmost prefecture which continues to this day.
Some 20,700 U.S. troops were stationed in Hokkaido in 1945. The main reason was security. Fighting between Japan and the Soviet Union continued even after Japan's Aug. 15 surrender, and Soviet troops by September had occupied what Japan still refers to as the Northern Territories and Russia calls its South Kuril District.
Hokkaido marked one of the borders between the U.S. sphere of influence and that of the former Soviet Union, said Mikine Yamazaki, a professor of political administration at the Hokkaido University Graduate School of Political Science. "Suddenly, Hokkaido's local concerns became matters of national policy."