I joined the JETRO Institute of Developing Economies in 1991 and have conducted regional studies on Thailand’s social and political issues. My interest in the bureaucratic polity, a network that supports Thailand’s authoritarian regime under military and bureaucratic leadership, has led me to pursue two research themes related to its maintenance and transformation. One theme involved the creation of an urban middle class that pressures the bureaucratic polity to change, expansion of environmental movements, and decentralization of power. For this theme, I emphasized empirical studies based on quantitative surveys and conducted analyses based on a 1994 survey of Thailand’s environmental awareness and a survey of regional elites in Southeast Asia (a 2013/14 KAKENHI project). The other theme concerns the process of creating a bureaucratic polity and the path dependency of the system. I am deeply interested in problems of bureaucratic control and administrative segmentation that manifest in environmental policies as well as the historical process of creating and reorganizing the bureaucratic polity.

My present research focuses on the process by which the bureaucratic network was created after the constitutional revolution of 1932, which then became the basis of Thailand’s bureaucratic polity. I am analyzing how Thai bureaucrats and politicians as well as emerging Chinese businesses took advantage of the constitutional revolution and built a network for economic policy formulation and created a system that would continuously implement policies even in the face of political instability caused by a rebellion or in the absence of the parliament. At the same time, I am conducting a comparative study to apply Western social theory on globalization and spatial reorganization (rescaling of the state) to the cases of Southeast Asian countries.