About

Jessamyn R. Abel is a Professor of Asian Studies and History at Pennsylvania State University. She is a historian specializing in modern Japan, with research interests encompassing democratization, technology, infrastructure, sports, and international relations. Her current research focuses on postwar Japan, examining how 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 within the population. Her scholarly work includes her latest book, Dream Super-Express, which was awarded the 2024 Modern Japan History Association Book Prize. This book explores 1960s Japan through the lens of the bullet train, illustrating how infrastructure functions beyond its practical purpose to serve cultural and sociological roles. Her first book, The International Minimum, investigates the development of Japanese internationalism during the transwar period. Abel has also published on topics such as the information society, the Olympics, cultural diplomacy, textbooks, and the history of whaling. Her teaching aims to foster students' understanding of shared human experiences across diverse societies, encouraging intellectual curiosity about other cultures and prompting reflection on their own place in the global community.

Research topics

• Computer Security
• Political Science
• Artificial Intelligence
• Computer Science
• Sociology
• Neuroscience
• Political economy
• Library science
• International trade
• Programming language
• Telecommunications
• Economics
• Psychology
• Art
• Business
• Law

Selected publications

• Japan’s sumo association turns 100 – but the sport’s rituals have a much older role shaping ideas about the country

  2025-10-23

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Green with Milk and Sugar: When Japan Filled America's Tea Cups By Robert Hellyer. New York: Columbia University Press, 2021. 304 pp. ISBN: 9780231199100 (cloth).

  The Journal of Asian Studies · 2022-11-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.

  PublisherDOI

• 5 Technology of Cultural Diplomacy

  Stanford University Press eBooks · 2022-01-11

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• 4 Nostalgia for Imperial Japan

  Stanford University Press eBooks · 2022-01-11

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Dream Super-Express

  Stanford University Press eBooks · 2022 · 5 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Art
  • Psychology
  • Neuroscience
  PublisherDOI

• Information Society on Track: Communication, Crime, and the Bullet Train

  Journal of Japanese Studies · 2021-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This article considers Japan's first bullet train line, completed in 1964, within the context of an emerging "information society." Developed for the industrial economy, the line was reinterpreted by urban planners and fiction writers as both a central infrastructure of the postindustrial society and a symbol of its promise and dangers. Infrastructure became a tool for grappling with fundamental socioeconomic changes. This essay is an intellectual and cultural history of two intersecting tracks, explaining how information became a lens through which infrastructure was read and how the bullet train became a key for understanding social change.

  PublisherDOI

• Technologies of Cold War Diplomacy: Transforming Postwar Japan

  Technology and Culture · 2021 · 6 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Political Science
  • Sociology

  In the mid-1960s, the Japanese government brought a technology focus to its relations with the United States, aiming to build respect for Japan as an equal partner in world affairs, as well as a source of high-quality industrial products. Efforts to replace its identity as an impoverished and defeated enemy with that of Cold War ally, trade partner, and industrial competitor were constrained by Americans' preconceptions and the particular functions of technology in international relations. The U.S. government engaged in its own technopolitics, mobilizing American technical knowledge to push Japanese policy in desired directions. This article highlights the difficulty of using technology as a tool of diplomacy by examining its role in U.S.-Japanese relations through a popular cultural initiative and top-level diplomatic discussions.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• J<scp>eremy</scp> A. Y<scp>ellen</scp>. <i>The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere: When Total Empire Met Total War</i>.

  The American Historical Review · 2021-06-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  In this thoroughly researched book, The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere: When Total Empire Met Total War, Jeremy Yellen traces the shifting policy significance and evolving meanings of the “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere” both within Japan and in other countries caught up in that imagined space. The book contributes to a growing body of scholarship that, rather than simply dismissing wartime rhetoric as no more than a flimsy cover for imperialism, seeks to understand its development and impact. By interrogating numerous explanations, interpretations, and uses of the slogan and its associated rhetorical flourishes by Japanese politicians, pundits, and policymakers, as well as the leaders of Burma and the Philippines, Yellen highlights the concept’s malleability. He identifies moments in which changing circumstances and competing perspectives brought about new or conflicting interpretations. Viewing the evolution of the idea from 1940 to 1945—when it was used to envision, justify, and even...

  PublisherDOI

• Railway Stations and the Production of Invisible Infrastructures

  City & Society · 2020 · 2 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Library science
  • Computer Science

  In her study of the community-building activities of West African immigrants in Paris' Gare du Nord railway station, Julie Kleinman demonstrates the productive power generated through the interaction of social and material infrastructures. When existing urban infrastructuresboth of the French state and their own kin and village networks-proved inadequate to the creation of sustainable lifestyles in migrants' new context of Paris, they used a node in the national transportation infrastructure of the French railway system to build a new social infrastructure that could help them survive and thrive in the city. Thus, the state-controlled infrastructure of the railway station became the site for the formation of new social networks as the result of innovative uses by immigrants who adopted it as a base for work and social life.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Borrowed spectacle

  2020-05-20

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  During the bidding and preparation for three Tokyo Olympiads – the cancelled 1940 Games, the successful 1964 Games, and the upcoming 2020 Games – political actors mobilised Olympic symbolism and rhetoric for particular purposes. Juxtaposing three examples of Olympic planning for a single city in disparate historical circumstances shows the flexibility and persistence of the particular opportunities and pressures created by the Olympics’ enduring symbolism and their impact on domestic political contests. The political usefulness of the Olympics emerges from the ambiguous politics of the Olympic Movement, the mass media attention to the Games, and the nested spatiality of an event overseen by an international organisation for a global audience but organised along national lines and hosted by a single city.

  PublisherDOI

Awards & honors

• 2024 Modern Japan History Association Book Prize