2024 MJHA Book Prize Finalists

Jessamyn Abel, Dream Super-Express: A Cultural History of the World’s First Bullet Train (Stanford University Press, 2022)

Brian Hurley, Confluence and Conflict: Reading Transwar Japanese Literature and Thought (Harvard University Asia Center, 2022)

Sherzod Muminov, Eleven Winters of Discontent: The Siberian Internment and the Making of a New Japan (Harvard University Press, 2022)

2024 MJHA Book Prize Winner

Jessamyn R. Abel

Author of Dream Super-Express: A Cultural History of the World's First Bullet Train (Stanford University Press, 2022) 

Dream Super-Express sheds fresh light on postwar Japan’s rise to technological and economic superstardom. Integrating the histories of technology, infrastructure, economics, politics, diplomacy, and empire, Abel provides compelling new insights on the “long 1960s” in Japan. Elegantly organized along an expanding spatial trajectory, the book details pragmatic and symbolic power struggles among ordinary people, elected representatives, technocrats, artists, and local, national, and international actors, all of whom had conflicting stakes in the development of the world’s then-fastest mass transit vehicle. In the process, Abel illuminates both the promise and pitfalls of democracy, technocracy, economic growth, and civic activism.