John Whitney Hall Book Prize
The 31st annual John Whitney Hall Book Prize will be awarded at the AAS Annual Conference in 2025 for an outstanding English language book published on Japan during 2023.
2025 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.
Books published by the Association for Asian Studies, Inc. are ineligible for consideration for prizes administered by the Association for Asian Studies. Employees of the Association are excluded from consideration for AAS book prizes, subventions, and grants. Publishers should check with authors to certify that they are not employed by the Association for Asian Studies, Inc.
Deadline
The nomination deadline is June 30, 2024. Nominations will open for submission later in spring 2024.
Hall Prize Committee
Gabriele Koch (Chair)
University of Oslo
Charo D’Etcheverry
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Victor Seow
Harvard University
David Fedman
University of California, Irvine
2024 Awards
Winner and Citation
Sherzod Muminov, Eleven Winters of Discontent: The Siberian Internment and the Making of a New Japan (Harvard University Press)
Beautifully written and boldly conceived, Eleven Winters of Discontent is a tour de force of multi-archival and multilingual research that examines the internment of over 600,000 Japanese soldiers and civilians in Soviet forced labor camps between 1945 and 1956. Author Sherzod Muminov tracks lived experience as well as geopolitics to eschew simple characterizations of these prisoners of war as either innocent victims or deserving detainees. This careful, erudite study offers a sweeping account of the shifting contours of postwar Japanese-Soviet relations and will unquestionably shape future research on the Siberian Internment and, with it, Japan’s place in the Cold War world.
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
2022 Gabriele Koch, Healing Labor: Japanese Sex Work in the Gendered Economy
2023 Victor Seow, Carbon Technocracy: Energy Regimes in Modern East Asia; Honorable Mentions, Michael K. Bourdaghs, A Fictional Commons: Natsume Soseki and the Properties of Modern Literature and Reginald Jackson, A Proximate Remove: Queering Intimacy and Loss in The Tale of Genji