It seems as though most countries have some sort of Independence day, particularly those that were occupied by other countries. This makes sense because you can't really have an Independence Day if you were always independent. Thanks to the conquest done by European nations a million years ago, a great deal of the world has a reason to celebrate an Independence Day of some sort and for Vietnam it happens on the 2nd of September.
Normally this day would include lavish celebrations including fireworks and parades but thanks to Covid, here in Da Nang there is no celebration outside of what people decide to do in front of their own homes. They might have some sort of celebration elsewhere in the country but on my walk this morning the streets were even more barren than usual. It is kind of bittersweet to have a public holiday during covid lockdown because almost all of the shops were closed anyway.
The Independence of Vietnam was not achieved through a massive war like one would expect in many of these situations, but it did largely happen because of one - the biggest one actually.
The Japanese occupied Vietnam during World War 2, as well as most of the surrounding areas all the way up to Russia. Prior to that, Vietnam was more or less a French colony. Even once the Japanese "took over" they allowed the French to remain in order to control the population for them. I would imagine that the idea was that the Japanese had a plan to allow the French to maintain the colony even though Japan and France were technically at war with one another at the time. I have no reason to believe this is the case but I think the Japanese were being sneaky and having the French do their job for them while keeping the French believing that they were going to allow them to maintain colonial control - which almost certainly would have not happened if the war had ended differently.
After the way the Japanese kept their promise, not that they had a choice and the French were still in charge of the country. It was a really fast sequence of events in August of 1945 that is dubbed the "August Revolution" and saw the Viet Minh take control of government offices all over the country. In the same month the last monarch of Vietnam gave up the throne. By September this mostly bloodless "coup" was complete and Ho Chi Minh read the Declarations of Independence of Vietnam in Hanoi.
Of course we all know that the French didn't take this sitting down and would almost immediately return in an attempt to retake what they considered to be theirs...poorly... and 30 years of war against multiple countries would end up being a consequence. You have to admire the country's resolve though because they absolutely refused to give up even though they were facing far more powerful opposition throughout this entire time-frame.
This year, the streets are empty and maybe the government will fire off some fireworks tonight, as far as I know there is not plan for this but maybe they want to surprise us. It's a real shame they can't do a big show about it because 75 years is a pretty important milestone for any achievement.