John Whitney Hall Book Prize
The 29th annual John Whitney Hall Book Prize will be awarded at the AAS annual conference in 2023 for an outstanding English language book published on Japan during 2021.
Prize
The winner will receive a $1,000 prize.
Guidelines for Submission
- Books nominated may address either contemporary or historical topics in any field of the humanities or the social sciences.
- Translations from Japanese into English are eligible only if they include a substantial introduction, annotation, and critical apparatus.
- Reference works, exhibition catalogs, multi-authored collections of essays, textbooks, original poetry or fiction, memoirs, or autobiographies are not eligible.
- Authors need not be members of the AAS.
- Publishers must complete the book nomination form. Each press may nominate a maximum of three books for the Hall Prize competition.
- Only publishers may nominate books.
- Upon receipt of a completed nomination form, publishers will be provided with addresses for prize committee members. A copy of each entry, clearly labeled “John Whitney Hall Prize,” must be sent to each member of the committee.
Deadline
Nominations must be received by June 30, 2022 to be eligible for the 2023 awards.
Hall Prize Committee
Akiko Takenaka (Chair)
University of Kentucky
Charo D’Etcheverry
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Benjamin Uchiyama
University of Southern California
Gabriele Koch
Yale-NUS College
2022 Awards
Winner and Citation
Gabriele Koch, Healing Labor: Japanese Sex Work in the Gendered Economy (Stanford University Press, 2020)
Healing Labor makes a powerful and notably nuanced contribution to the on-going conversation about how globalization and neoliberal policies have reshaped Japanese society and Japan’s labor market. While the study centers on Japanese women’s work in Japan’s booming sex trade, supported by rich ethnographic analysis of how these women understand their role in the industry, it also interrogates the unintended effects of well-intentioned transnational movements (the fight against human trafficking, in this instance), shown here to as minimizing the agency of sex workers while allowing other Japanese to ignore the structural incentives for such labor within the Japanese economy itself. Written with elegance and clarity, Healing Labor demonstrates refreshing insights into the importance of understanding Japan’s economy in gendered terms by highlighting the lives of Japanese female sex workers.
Honorable Mention
Past Awards
John Whitney Hall Book Prize
1994 Carter J. Eckert, Offspring of Empire, the Koch’and and Kims and the Colonial Origins of Korean Capitalism, 1876-1945
1995 Melinda Takeuchi, Taiga’s True Views: The Language of Landscape Painting in Eighteenth-Century Japan
1996 Richard J. Samuels, “Rich Nation, Strong Army”: National Security and the Technological Transformation of Japan
1997 John Whittier Treat, Writing Ground Zero: Japanese Literature and the Atomic Bomb
1998 James B. Palais, Confucian Statecraft and Korean Institutions: Yu Hyongwon and the Late Choson Dynasty
1999 Susan B. Hanley, Everyday Things in Premodern Japan: The Hidden Legacy of Material Culture
2000 William M. Tsutsui, Manufacturing Ideology: Scientific Management in 20th Century Japan
2001 Mark J. Hudson, Ruins of Identity: Ethnogenesis in the Japanese Islands
2002 Thomas Lamarre, Uncovering Heian Japan: An Archeology of Sensation and Inscription
2003 E. Taylor Atkins, Blue Nippon: Authenticating Jazz in Japan
2004 Andre Schmid, Korea Between Empires, 1895-1919
2005 Jordan Sand, House and Home in Modern Japan: Architecture, Domestic Space, and Bourgeois Culture, 1880-1930
2006 Andrew M. Watsky, Chikubushima: Deploying the Sacred Arts in Momoyama Japan
2007 Eiko Ikegami, Bonds of Civility: Aesthetic Networks and the Political Origins of Japanese Culture
2008 Karen Nakamura, Deaf in Japan: Signing and the Politics of Identity
2009 Ann Jannetta, The Vaccinators: Smallpox, Medical Knowledge, and the “Opening” of Japan
2010 Ken K. Ito, An Age of Melodrama: Family, Gender, and Social Hierarchy in the Turn-of-the-Century Japanese Novel
2011 Karen Thornber, Empire of Texts in Motion: Chinese, Korean, and Taiwanese Transculturations of Japanese Literature
2012 Lori Meeks, Hokkeji and the Reemergence of Female Monastic Orders in Premodern Japan
2013 Mary C. Brinton, Lost in Transition: Youth, Work, and Instability in Postindustrial Japan
2014 Yukio Lippit, Painting of the Realm: The Kano House of Painters in 17th-Century Japan
2015 Fabian Drixler, Mabiki: Infanticide and Population Growth in Eastern Japan, 1660-1950
2016 Ran Zwigenberg, Hiroshima: The Origins of Global Memory Culture
2017 Noriko Manabe, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised: Protest Music After Fukushima
2018 Satoko Shimazaki, Edo Kabuki in Transition: From the Worlds of the Samurai to the Vengeful Female Ghost
2019 Bryan D. Lowe, Ritualized Writing: Buddhist Practice and Scriptural Cultures in Ancient Japan
2020 Aiko Takeuchi-Demirci, Contraceptive Diplomacy: Reproductive Politics and Imperial Ambitions in the United States and Japan
2021 Benjamin Uchiyama, Japan’s Carnival War: Mass Culture on the Home Front, 1937-1945