UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Jessamyn R. Abel, associate professor of Asian studies in the College of the Liberal Arts, recently received a significant award recognizing her committed scholarship on modern Japan.
Abel was the recipient of the Journal of Japanese Studies’ Kenneth B. Pyle Prize for Best Article in JJS for her paper, “Information Society on Track: Communication, Crime, and the Bullet Train.” The prize, named for the journal’s founding editor, is given annually to a JJS research article published during the previous year.
Articles eligible for the Pyle Prize are evaluated for their contribution “to supporting the JJS mission of promoting the highest-quality scholarship through publication of empirical and interpretive work on Japan.” The prize’s committee commended Abel’s article “for the originality and creativity of the approach it takes in shedding light on the significance of the Shinkansen as a symbol of change, modernity, and high-speed mobility…turning our gaze to a stretch of 20th-century history that is sorely understudied, and fully embodying the interdisciplinarity the Journal of Japanese Studies stands for.”
Abel said the news of the prize came as a nice surprise.
“When I received the email, the subject heading was ‘2021 Pyle Prize winner,’ and I assumed it was a general announcement sent out to their mailing list. So, I opened it with the mindset of wondering who won to make sure I’d read the winning article,” Abel said. “Since this is among the very best journals in my field, I was absolutely thrilled and honored, especially when I considered the excellent articles that had been published alongside mine.”
A specialist on the cultural history, technology, infrastructure, sports, and international relations of modern Japan, Abel has written two books: “The International Minimum: Creativity and Contradiction in Japan’s Global Engagement, 1933-1964,” which examines the transwar development of Japanese internationalism; and “Dream Super-Express: A Cultural History of the World’s First Bullet Train,” a look at how the Tōkaidō Shinkansen bullet train transcended its transportation purposes to serve as a means of cultural and sociological change in 1960s Japan.
Abel developed the idea for the JJS article while a fellow at Penn State’s Center for Humanities and Information. She applied for the fellowship after theorizing that there was something to be said about information and the advent of high-speed rail in Japan.
As she listened to scholars connected with CHI and spoke with the other fellows about their work during her fellowship, Abel began to see the various ways Japanese planners, politicians and fiction writers connected the bullet train to the idea of cybernetics (the science of communications and automatic control systems in both machines and living things) to help explain the changes taking place in Japan at the time due to the emergence of an “information society.”
“It took that year of research to develop the idea but much longer to write it, because it took me into a field that I initially didn’t know much about and required me to read quite a lot of scholarship before I was ready to get it into publishable form,” she said. “It wasn’t until several years after my CHI fellowship that I submitted the article to JJS.”
Abel’s interest in modern Japan took shape as an undergraduate politics major at Princeton University, where her senior thesis examined Japanese-Russian relations through the ongoing territorial dispute over the Kurile Islands.
For Abel, the most compelling research topics are those “in which people or nations do things that are unexpected or seem somehow ‘out of character.’”
“I always want to know, ‘Why did they do that?’” she said. “Many of my research projects have come out of an effort to understand the reasoning behind what was, for me, an unexpected policy decision by the Japanese government.”
Abel is currently at work on her third book, tentatively titled “Practical Democracy,” which will examine the grassroots promotion of democracy during the Post-World War II American occupation of Japan from 1945-52. While Japan’s 1946 constitution established the framework of a democratic system of government, democratization itself “required more than just changing laws; they needed to change people’s minds,” according to Abel.
Through her research, Abel strives to figure out how the institutions behind “the infrastructures of daily life” helped prepare Japanese society for democracy.
“For instance, by training employees to do their jobs under changing social conditions, institutions like the national railway agency, industrial firms and sports organizations contributed to creating the popular mindset and participation that was deemed essential to democracy,” she said.
A member of the College of the Liberal Arts faculty since 2009, Abel said Penn State has proven to be an ideal academic home.
“One of the major benefits is our strong program in Japanese and Asian Studies, which has meant that I always have colleagues from several disciplines to talk to about my research,” she said. “Everything I’ve published since arriving at Penn State has first gone through the wringer of having colleagues read it and talk to me about it. So, they get a lot of the credit for helping me develop my work to the point of actually being selected as the prize winner.”