Historian Sheldon Garon will receive one of Japan’s highest honors awarded to a civilian from another country, the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold Rays with Neck Ribbon.

The award honors Garon’s contributions “to the promotion of academic exchanges and mutual understanding between Japan and the United States,” according to the official announcement from the Consulate General of Japan in New York.

The award citation noted that Garon, the Nissan Professor in Japanese Studies and professor of history and East Asian studies, has “distinguished himself in the field of modern Japanese history, contextualizing this subject through a transnational approach.” It also highlights Garon’s scholarship and teaching to expand “the globalization of Japanese academia and the mutual understanding between Japan and the United States.”

Garon has taught at Princeton for more than 40 years. He has received numerous honors, awards and honorary degrees throughout his career, but this award from the Japanese government is especially fulfilling, he said, because the primary focus of his scholarship and teaching has been focused on bringing Japan more fully into the academic discipline of global or “transnational” history.

In the modern era, “it's the first non-Western country that really got to be a powerful nation and a powerful economy — and they did it in different ways than European countries and the U.S.,” he said.

Since 2013, Garon has been instrumental in developing the Princeton University-University of Tokyo Strategic Partnership, which fosters collaborative mentorship, including selecting and funding about three or four projects a year across academic disciplines — in the humanities, social sciences, engineering, and natural sciences — all of which involve the exchange of colleagues and graduate students.

In 2014-15, he and several colleagues in the history department were also instrumental in helping to establish the University’s Global History Collaborative with the University of Tokyo, Humboldt and Freie universities in Berlin, and L'Ecole des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. In addition to annual conferences, hosted in turn by each university, the partnerships provided opportunities for Princeton graduate students to participate in collaborative research with scholars at the participating universities.

Garon teaches a number of undergraduate courses and graduate seminars including “20th-Century Japanese History” and “East Asia Since 1800.” He also teaches a Freshman Seminar called “The Global War on Civilians: Morality, Science and Race in the Bombing of Cities in World War II.”

The seminar “looks at the atomic bombs but also the firebombing of Japan and Germany — examining the way that nations tried to win wars not just by beating the enemy's army and navy, but by targeting civilians and cities,” Garon said. Beginning in the summer, he will serve as director of a five-year project devoted to that topic, “The Global War on Civilians: 1905-1945,” funded by the European Research Council.

Japan figures prominently in the project, he said. “It's one very sad, very dramatic story of violence around the world and all very much connected — you have to put Japan into that.”

He is the author of dozens of essays and journal articles including “Transnational History and Japan’s ‘Comparative Advantage’” in the Journal of Japanese Studies, and the books “Beyond Our Means: Why America Spends While the World Saves,” “Molding Japanese Minds: The State in Everyday Life” and “The State and Labor in Modern Japan.”

Garon’s other honors include the Humboldt Research Award for lifetime achievement and research in Germany, and fellowships from the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, Leverhulme Trust, Woodrow Wilson International Center and National Endowment for the Humanities, among others. He serves on the editorial board of the journals Japanese Studies and Contemporary Japan and is a former editorial board member of the Journal of Japanese Studies. He was a board trustee for the Society for Japanese Studies from 1996 to 2022.

He will accept the Order of the Rising Sun award at a May 28 event at the Consulate General of Japan in New York City.