John Whitney Hall Book Prize

The John Whitney Hall Book Prize has been awarded annually since 1994 by the Association for Asian Studies. 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.

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. 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.

List of honorees

1994 – Carter J. Eckert, Offspring of Empire, the Koch’ang 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 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 Twentieth-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.
2017 Honorable Mention— Federico Marcon, The Knowledge of Nature and the Nature of Knowledge in Early Modern Japan
2018 – Satoko Shimazaki, Edo Kabuki in Transition: From the Worlds of the Samurai to the Vengeful Female Ghost
2018 Honorable Mention— Yoshikuni Igarashi, Homecomings: The Belated Return of Japan’s Lost Soldiers
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
2020 Honorable Mention – Maren A. Ehlers, Give and Take: Poverty and the Status Order in Early Modern Japan
2021 – Benjamin Uchiyama, Japan's Carnival War: Mass Culture on the Home Front, 1937-1945
2021 Honorable Mention – Kirsten L. Ziomek, Lost Histories: Recovering the Lives of Japan's Colonial Peoples
2022 – Gabriele Koch, Healing Labor: Japanese Sex Work in the Gendered Economy
2022 Honorable Mention – Nozomi Naoi, Yumeji Modern: Designing the Everyday in Twentieth Century Japan
2023 – Victor Seow, Carbon Technocracy: Energy Regimes in Modern East Asia
2023 Honorable Mention – Michael K. Bourdaghs, A Fictional Commons: Natsume Soseki and the Properties of Modern Literature
2023 Honorable Mention – Reginald Jackson, A Proximate Remove: Queering Intimacy and Loss in The Tale of Genji
2024 – Sherzod Muminov, Eleven Winters of Discontent: The Siberian Internment and the Making of a New Japan
2024 Honorable Mention – Morgan Pitelka, Reading Medieval Ruins: Urban Life and Destruction in Sixteenth-Century Japan
2025 - Anne Allison, Being Dead Otherwise
2025 Honorable Mention - Akiko Takeyama, Involuntary Consent: The Illusion of Choice in Japan’s Adult Video Industry