Participant Info
- First Name
- Jessamyn R.
- Last Name
- Abel
- Country
- United States
- State
- PA
- jua14@psu.edu
- Affiliation
- Pennsylvania State University
- Website URL
- https://asian.la.psu.edu/people/jua14/
- Keywords
- democratization, infrastructure, sports, diplomacy
- Availability
- Media Contact
- Additional Contact Information
- PhD
- PhD
Personal Info
- Photo
- About Me
I am a historian of modern Japan with interests in democratization, technology, infrastructure, sports, and international relations. My current research focuses on postwar Japan to examine the ways in which institutions of daily life (such as the national railway, the public broadcaster, the police, and Parent-Teacher Associations) work to instill democratic practices and attitudes in a population. My latest book, Dream Super-Express (winner of the 2024 Modern Japan History Association Book Prize), views 1960s Japan through the window of the bullet train, showing how infrastructure operates beyond its intended use to perform cultural and sociological functions. My first book, The International Minimum, examines the transwar development of Japanese internationalism. I have also published on the information society, the Olympics, cultural diplomacy, textbooks, and the history of whaling.
- Recent Publications
Dream Super-Express: A Cultural History of the World’s First Bullet Train (Stanford University Press, 2022). Winner of the 2024 Modern Japanese History Association: https://mjha.org/Book-Prize.
“Information Society on Track: Communication, Crime, and Japan’s First Bullet Train.” Journal of Japanese Studies 47, no. 2 (Summer 2021). Winner of the Kenneth B. Pyle Prize.
“Technologies of Cold War Diplomacy: Transforming Japan.” Technology and Culture (January 2021): 128–155.
Co-editor with Leo Coleman. “Infrastructures and Global Political Aesthetics.” Special issue of Verge: Studies in Global Asias 6, no. 2 (2020).
- Media Coverage
- https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3ct5n0d
- Social Media
- Country Focus
- Japan
- Expertise by Geography
- Asia, East Asia, Japan
- Expertise by Chronology
- Modern, 20th century, 21st century
- Expertise by Topic
- Diplomacy, Government, Material Culture, Politics, Sports, Technology, Urban History, World War II
