The Modern Japan History Association (mjha.org) is pleased to announce the winners of its 2026 prizes and awards.

Simon Partner (Professor of History, Duke University) was awarded the 2026 Modern Japan History Association Book Prize for his book Koume's World: The Life and Work of a Samurai Woman Before and After the Meiji Restoration (Columbia University Press, 2024). Exhaustively researched and quietly ambitious, Koume's World draws upon the singular diary of a talented poet, artist, and matriarch to reconstruct the quotidian experiences of a lower-ranking samurai family in the provincial center of Wakayama over the course of the nineteenth century. Accessibly written and suitable for nonspecialists and undergraduates as well as historians of modern Japan, the book seamlessly integrates large historical processes with the granular concerns of an ordinary individual in extraordinary times. Through his sensitive reading of Koume's poignant reflections, Partner highlights the idiosyncratic impacts of modernization across Japan's seismic transition from the Tokugawa to the Meiji period. The other two finalists for the Book Prize were Kristopher W. Kersey (Associate Professor, Arts of Japan, UCLA) for his book Facing Images: Medieval Japanese Art and the Problem of Modernity (The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2024) and Barak Kushner (Professor of East Asian History, Cambridge University) for his book The Geography of Injustice: East Asia's Battle Between Memory and History (Cornell University Press, 2024).

Anri Yasuda (Assistant Professor of Japanese Literature, University of Virginia) was awarded the 2026 F. Hilary Conroy First Book Prize for her book Beauty Matters: Modern Japanese Literature and the Question of Aesthetics, 1890-1930 (Columbia University Press, 2024). Beauty Matters investigates the ineffable, non-discursive qualities of socially engaged art through the Japanese novel. The book traces a genealogy of meditations on the seemingly contradictory task taken up by Japan's self-consciously modern writers: to expose unpleasant psychological and social truths while producing aesthetically pleasing compositions. In her own beautiful prose, Yasuda plumbs the writings, lives, and visual art inspiration of Natsume Sōseki, Mori Ogai, Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, and Mushanokōji Saneatsu, showing the novel as a uniquely capacious instrument for social critique and political agency in the early twentieth century.

Sara Kang (Society of Fellows, Princeton University) was awarded the Charlotte J. Conroy Dissertation Prize for her dissertation Operation Relax: Empires of Sex in Japan, South Korea, and the Asia-Pacific, 1945-1995 (Harvard University, History, 2024). Operation Relax is an innovative and deeply researched analysis of postwar militarism, gender, and empire in the Asia-Pacific. Examining the UN- and U.S.-managed Rest and Recuperation (R&R) system during the Korean and Vietnam Wars, Kang traces the expansion of military sex regimes from Japan to cities across East and Southeast Asia. Drawing on an impressive multilingual archive--English, Japanese, and Korean sources ranging from women's testimonies to military and state documents--the study recenters women's lived experiences while revealing the shared structures of labor control, sexual regulation, and racialized governance that buttressed Cold War militarization. Operation Relax makes a major contribution to the histories of Japan, the Asia-Pacific, gender, and the Cold War. The other two finalists for the Charlotte J. Conroy Prize were Kandra Polatis, for her dissertation Anatomical Afterlives: Science, Dissection, and the (De-)Construction of the Modern Subject in Imperial Japan (University of California, Santa Barbara, History, 2024), and Isaac Tan, for his dissertation Blood and Empire: The Emergence of Hemotypology (Blood-Group Studies) in Early Twentieth-Century Japan (Columbia University, History, 2024).

Jordan Sand (Professor of History, Georgetown University) has been voted by the membership of MJHA to be the 2026 Modern Japan History Association Distinguished Annual Lecturer. Professor Sand will give a public lecture on a topic to be determined on a date to be determined in October 2026.

For more information on MJHA's prizes and awards, and for links to information on how to submit nominations for the 2027 prizes, visit mjha.org/Prizes