John Whitney Hall Book Prize

The John Whitney Hall Book Prize has been awarded annually since 1994 by the Association for Asian Studies (AAS). Pioneer Japanese studies scholar John Whitney Hall is commemorated in the name of this prize.

The Hall Prize acknowledges an outstanding English language book published on Japan or Korea; and the prize honors the author of the book.

AAS prize

AAS is a scholarly, non-political, non-profit professional association open to all persons interested in Asia. The association was founded in 1941 as publisher of the Far Eastern Quarterly (now the Journal of Asian Studies). The organization has gone through a series of reorganizations since those early days; but its continuing function serves to further an exchange of information among scholars to increase understanding about East, South, and Southeast Asia.

The Northeast Asia Council (NEAC) of the AAS oversees the John Whitney Hall Book Prize.

Select list of honorees

This is a dynamic list and may never be able to satisfy particular standards for completeness. You can help by adding missing items with reliable sources.

• 1994 — Carter J. Eckert, Offspring of Empire, the Koch’ang and Kims and the Colonial Origins of Korean Capitalism, 1876–1945 (University of Washington Press, 1991)
• 1995 — Melinda Takeuchi, Taiga’s True Views: The Language of Landscape Painting in Eighteenth-Century Japan (Stanford University Press, 1993)
• 1996 — Richard J. Samuels, Rich Nation, Strong Army: National Security and the Technological Transformation of Japan (Cornell University Press, 1994)
• 1997 — John Whittier Treat, Writing Ground Zero: Japanese Literature and the Atomic Bomb (University of Chicago Press, 1995)
• 1998 — James Palais, Confucian Statecraft and Korean Institutions: Yu Hyongwon and the Late Choson Dynasty (University of Washington Press, 1996)
• 1999 — Susan B. Hanley, Everyday Things in Premodern Japan: The Hidden Legacy of Material Culture (University of California Press, 1997)
• 2000 — William M. Tsutsui, Manufacturing Ideology: Scientific Management in Twentieth-Century Japan (Princeton University Press, 1998)
• 2001 — Mark J. Hudson, Ruins of Identity: Ethnogenesis in the Japanese Islands (University of Hawaii Press, 1999)
• 2002 — Thomas LaMarre, Uncovering Heian Japan: An Archeology of Sensation and Inscription (Duke University Press, 2000)
• 2003 — E. Taylor Atkins, Blue Nippon: Authenticating Jazz in Japan (Duke University Press, 2001)
• 2004 — Andre Schmid, Korea Between Empires, 1895–1919 (Columbia University Press, 2002)
• 2005 — Jordan Sand, House and Home in Modern Japan: Architecture, Domestic Space, and Bourgeois Culture, 1880–1930 (Harvard University Asia Center, 2003).
• 2006 — Andrew M. Watsky, Chikubushima: Deploying the Sacred Arts in Momoyama Japan (University of Washington Press, 2004).
• 2007 — Eiko Ikegami, Bonds of Civility: Aesthetic Networks and the Political Origins of Japanese Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2005)
• 2008 — Karen Nakamura, Deaf in Japan: Signing and the Politics of Identity (Cornell University Press, 2006)
• 2009 — Ann Jannetta, The Vaccinators: Smallpox, Medical Knowledge, and the ‘Opening’ of Japan (Stanford University Press, 2007)
• 2010 — Ken K. Ito, An Age of Melodrama: Family, Gender, and Social Hierarchy in the Turn-of-the Century Japanese Novel (Stanford University Press, 2008)
• 2011 — Karen Thornber, Empire of Texts in Motion: Chinese, Korean, and Taiwanese Transculturations of Japanese Literature (Harvard University Press, 2009)