John Whitney Hall

John Whitney Hall was one of the foremost historians of Japan in the Anglophone world in the postwar years. His work on pre-modern and early modern Japan forms an important foundation for much work on those periods today.

He was the son of M. Ernest Hall and Marjorie Whitney Hall.

Selected Publications

• “Notes on The Early Ch’ing Copper Trade With Japan,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 12, no. 3/4 (December 1, 1949), 444-461.
• Tanuma Okitsugu: Forerunner of Modern Japan, Harvard University Press, 1955.
• Goverment and Local Power in Japan, 500 to 1700: A Study Based on Bizen Province, Princeton University Press, 1966. (Republished by Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 1999).
• “Rule by Status in Tokugawa Japan,” Journal of Japanese Studies 1:1 (1974), 39–49.
• (ed. with Toyota Takeshi), Japan in the Muromachi Age, University of California Press, 1977. (Republished, Cornell University East Asia Program, 2001).
• (ed. with Nagahara Keiji and Kozo Yamamura), Japan Before Tokugawa, Princeton University Press, 1981.
• (ed. with Marius Jansen), Studies in the Institutional History of Early Modern Japan, Princeton University Press, 1968.
• “Terms and Concepts in Japanese Medieval History: An Inquiry into the Problems of Translation.” Journal of Japanese Studies 9, no. 1 (January 1, 1983): 1–32.
• (ed.) The Cambridge History of Japan, vol. 4, Cambridge University Press, 1991.