The Japan Art History Forum (JAHF), a great online community / mailing list for art historians & scholars of visual culture of Japan, offers an annual prize for outstanding papers in Japanese art history or visual culture. I have copied the formal wording of their call for entries below:

2014 Chino Kaori Memorial Prize for Graduate Students

Japan Art History Forum (JAHF) is pleased to announce the thirteenth annual Chino Kaori Memorial Prize competition. Established in 2003 in memory of the distinguished art historian Chino Kaori, the Chino Prize is awarded annually to a graduate student who has written an outstanding essay on a topic in the study of Japanese art history or visual culture. The award recognizes excellence in scholarship, with several past prize-winning essays later published in peer-reviewed journals. For more about past Chino Prize essays, please go to: http://jahf.net/chinoprizewin

The Chino Prize is administered by JAHF and generously supported by the University of Hawai’i Press. The prize recipient will be awarded $400 in books from the University of Hawai’i Press catalogue and a complimentary two-year membership to JAHF.

The competition is open to graduate students from any university. Submissions should include an essay, abstract, and illustrations (see Submission Guidelines below). Essays may not be previously published in any form or currently under review for publication.

Submission Guidelines:
– Essay, under 10,000 words (excluding notes), in Times New Roman, 12 pt., double-spaced.
– Abstract, 250 words.
– Illustrations, with the size of each image less than 75 dpi, the maximum size of the total file 4MB.
– Please send the above three items in a single Word or PDF file.

The deadline for submission is August 1, 2014.
Please send submissions to Xiaojin Wu, JAHF Vice-President, at: XiaojinW@SEATTLEARTMUSEUM.ORG

Submissions that do not meet the above specifications will not be accepted. The recipient of the prize will be announced in September. The selection committee will post an abstract of the prize winning paper on the JAHF website.

The 2014 Committee is looking forward to your submissions.

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Only JAHF members are eligible to enter the competition, but annual membership is only $10 for graduate students, $25 otherwise.

If you are a graduate student, museum staff, or scholar or professional otherwise working in Japanese art or visual culture, JAHF is a great group to join up with. The mailing list is quite active, both with discussions of questions or issues in scholarship (such as translation or terminology) and with postings about conferences, job openings, and the like. JAHF generally sponsors a panel at the College Art Association (CAA) and/or Association for Asian Studies (AAS) conferences each year, and I’ve personally found it a great way to get to meet many of the prominent scholars in the field.