UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Penn State Associate Professor of Asian Studies Jessamyn R. Abel recently received the 2024 Modern Japan History Association (MJHA) Book Prize for her second book, “Dream Super-Express: A Cultural History of the World’s First Bullet Train.”
Abel finished ahead of two other finalists for the inaugural prize, awarded to an outstanding English-language book on modern Japan or Japanese history that was published 2022. The non-profit MJHA is a professional association of scholars tasked with supporting “the creation and dissemination of knowledge about modern Japan and its history by encouraging collaboration and intellectual exchange between scholars around the world, organizing events and workshops related to research and teaching, and recognizing and promoting outstanding works of scholarship,” according to their website.
In April, Abel will present a virtual lecture on the book open to MJHA members and the public. Afterwards, a video of the talk will be uploaded to MJHA’s YouTube page.
“I was extremely surprised and thrilled, as there were many excellent books on modern Japan published in 2022,” Abel said. “This prize means a lot to me, since it was decided by colleagues who are most familiar with my field — other historians of modern Japan. It’s also special that it’s a new prize, so I’m excited to have received the inaugural award.”
Published by Stanford University Press, “Dream Super-Express” examines how the Tōkaidō Shinkansen bullet train transcended its transportation purposes to serve as a means of cultural and sociological change in 1960s Japan as the country ascended to economic and technological powerhouse status.
Abel said she became curious about the bullet train while researching the 1964 Tokyo Olympics for her first book, “The International Minimum: Creativity and Contradiction in Japan’s Global Engagement, 1933-1964,” which looks at the trans-war development of Japanese internationalism.
“Since the bullet train started running just before the Olympic opening ceremony, I ended up seeing a lot of news about it, and I was surprised by the incredible excitement about it,” Abel said. “I wanted to know why people were so excited about a train when the world was already in the jet age and even entering the space age. It ended up being a much more complicated question than I thought, and this book is my effort to answer it.”
Abel’s current projects include an essay on Japan’s soccer diplomacy in East Asia. And she’s hard at work on her third book, “Practical Democracy: Cultivating a New Postwar Japan, 1945-1955,” a study of the often self-serving promotion of democracy by large institutions during the post-World War II American occupation of Japan.
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, who is looking at 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,” said Abel, who plans to travel to Tokyo this summer to conduct further research for the book.