Announcement: Kenneth B. Pyle Prize for Best Article in JJS 2025
Morgan Pitelka
The Kenneth B. Pyle Prize is awarded each year to honor the founding editor of the Journal of Japanese Studies. You can read more about the prize here: https://www.japanesestudies.org/pyle-prize
For 2025, the selection committee is proud to award the Pyle Prize to Eugenia Bogdanova-Kummer for her essay, “Zen Violence: The Legacy of Nantenbō Tōjū’s Calligraphy in the Postwar Avant-Garde.” The committee was impressed with the author’s skillful analysis of the Zen of the Japanese Empire that engendered the artist as masculine hero on the artistic and more broadly cultural battlefields of the Cold War. Elegantly interweaving religion and art, at times of war and peace, Bogdanova-Kummer deftly engages a broad range of scholarship in her pursuit of creative, novel, and ambitious interpretations.
Eugenia Bogdanova-Kummer, “Zen Violence: The Legacy of Nantenbō Tōjū’s Calligraphy in the Postwar Avant-Garde.” The Journal of Japanese Studies (2025) 51 (1): 1–40.
https://doi.org/10.1525/jjs.2025.51.1.1
Published: 01 January 2025
Kenneth B. Pyle Prize Honorable Mention 2025
The selection committee is delighted to recognize Reut Harari’s essay, “Regimenting the Skin: Kanpu Masatsu and the History of Medical Popularization” with an honorable mention for its innovative exploration of a most ordinary practice of self care. The piece stands out for its bold attempt to rescue the modern story of medicine from institutions, innovations, and the state in an effort to recenter it on the surface of the human body.
Reut Harari, “Regimenting the Skin: Kanpu Masatsu and the History of Medical Popularization.”
The Journal of Japanese Studies (2025) 51 (2): 309–351.
https://doi.org/10.1525/jjs.2025.51.2.309
Published: 01 August 2025
Best,
Morgan Pitelka
Bernard L. Herman Distinguished Professor, UNC-Chapel Hill
Department of History, Department of Asian & Middle Eastern Studies, Curriculum in Archaeology
Coeditor, Journal of Japanese Studies