An Interview with Prof. Kozuke Mizuno
Interviewer:
Dianto Bachriadi (Guest Scholar, CSEAS, Kyoto University)
Masaaki Okamoto (Professor, CSEAS, Kyoto University)
Professor Mizuno is an economist who has devoted 24 years to the Center for Southeast Asian Studies (CSEAS) where he started as an assistant professor (1996) and rose to the position of director for four years (2007–2011). This directorship was an embryonic period for internationalizing CSEAS and resulted in the successful launch of a global Center of Excellence (COE) program (2007–2011). His research has been a long-term commitment to transforming academic paradigms from the perspective of temperate areas of the Western countries and Japan to those more attuned to the Asian tropics and African realities.
As a teacher he has inspired students inside and outside of Japan to study Southeast Asia. Over the years, he has served as a visiting scholar at the Bogor Agricultural University (IPB) and Bandung Institute of Technology (ITB) and contributed to forging strong academic networks with universities in Indonesia. Utilizing not only the Indonesian language, but also Sundanese and Dutch, he has published numerous and meticulous fieldwork-based work on the importance of the non-agricultural sector in rural villages in Java, history-dependent complex issues on land certificates in rural societies, and urban labor issues. He has led a team of researchers from different academic backgrounds to research societies living in peat areas in Riau, Indonesia, and the results were published as a book on peat fire issues, both in Japanese and English. In this interview, conducted by Dianto Bachriadi and Okamoto Masaaki, he reflects on his life as a researcher. The interview was conducted in Bahasa Indonesian.
Translated from Indonesian by Cahaya Putri
Editing: Mario Lopez, Masaaki Okamoto
(Published in CSEAS Newsletter No. 77 (Spring/Summer 2019))
This article is also available in Japanese. >>
「インドネシアの人々とともに歩んで：
水野広祐教授退職記念鼎談」
