The history of CSEAS predates its official establishment. In the spring of l959, a group of scholars in Kyoto began to organize monthly seminars on various aspects of Southeast Asian culture and society. As the seminars gradually attracted an increasing number of faculty members and graduate students from universities in and around Kyoto, the enthusiastic participants sought the possibility of organizing the informal gathering into a more institutionalized forum. A preparatory committee was formed in l961 to organize a systematic program of Southeast Asian studies, one that included the natural sciences, which were neglected in most area studies programs in Western universities and research institutes. These developments culminated in the creation of CSEAS in January 1963 on the campus of Kyoto University as a semi-official body for coordinating Southeast Asian studies.

The newly organized center lost no time in launching a joint research project with special emphasis on Thailand and Malaysia. Researchers went to these two countries to conduct fieldwork, ranging from detailed community studies by anthropologists to investigations of tropical forests, paddy soils, and agricultural techniques by natural scientists. It was to facilitate these field activities that the liaison office was opened in Bangkok in October 1963 and staffed by representatives of the Center. The office in Jakarta has been similarly staffed since l970. Funding for fieldwork in the early years came primarily from private sources, including a research grant from the Ford Foundation and a domestic fund raised by supporters of the center. The results of the center’s research programs in its inceptive stage were so promising that the Ministry of Education, Science and Culture (Monbusho) decided to grant the center formal status in order to foster its area studies program. Thus, in April 1965 the center was reorganized as a “research center” with posts for four full-time staff members, the first such center to be created at a Japanese university.

Apart from these research projects, CSEAS initiated official programs and established a publication office, a library, and exchange and training programs to strengthen its institutional base. The publication program, beginning with the inauguration of the first issue of Southeast Asian Studies in July 1963, was responsible for publishing the annual bulletin of CSEAS in both English and Japanese, and occasional/discussion papers reporting the tentative results of intensive fieldwork in the region. The Monograph publication series was launched not only in Japanese but also in English, the latter from the University of Hawai’i Press, with the initiative of Director Shinichi Ichimura as the Monograph of the Center for Southeast Asian Studies. The Hawaii series now has 21 volumes out, many of which are studies mainly by natural scientists.

The construction of a well-equipped library was also a primary concern of CSEAS and was at this time a collection of basic references on and from Southeast Asia and exchange of periodicals and other research materials with academic institutions were initiated by the library program. The most important mission of this program at the early stage was to obtain membership access to the Human Relation Area Files (HRAF). As a result of the hard work of the library staff, the files in the HRAF room in the Central Library were opened to the public in April 1965. The exchange program enabled the center to invite leading scholars and top officials in charge of research administration from abroad as well as from other institutions in Japan to organize international conferences in Kyoto University; in turn, CSEAS was able to send its staff members as well as Japan-based scholars and graduate students to Southeast Asian and Western universities. Among the many promising researchers and graduate students who were selected as research scholars or awarded research fellowships by this program were a number of scholars who came to be attached to the CSEAS research staff, including such prominent specialists as Professors Yoshikazu Takaya, Hayao Fukui, Yoshihiro Tsubouchi, Toru Yano, Yoshihiro Kaida, Narifumi Maeda Tachimoto, Isamu Yamada, and Kenji Tsuchiya.

In its first stage of organizational development, CSEAS was able to construct a platform for researchers to organize and conduct joint studies with their institutional counterparts within Kyoto University, in Japan more generally, in the region, and elsewhere. The second stage began when Professors Ichimura Shinichi, Tadayo Watabe, and Yoneo Ishii (1929-2010) succeeded each other as director of CSEAS. The team projects organized in the second stage were conducted mainly with the support of external funds. The increase in the amount of governmental financial support for scientific research such as Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research (Kakenhi) from Monbusho helped promote and strengthen joint studies after the early 1970s. Carrying out individual research related to each researcher’s concern and organizing and participating in joint studies became a principle by which every CSEAS staff abided.

Field survery trip Dong Daeng Village in Northeast Thailand. Professor Kaida Yoshihiro donating electric wires to a newly built "forest temple."

In line with this principle, CSEAS organized team projects such as “Regional Economic Survey of South Sumatra,” “Agro-environmental Studies of the Mekong Delta of Vietnam,” “Potential Survey of Lowland Soils in Thailand,” “National Independence Movement in Southeast Asia,” “Impact of Industrialization on Rural Communities,” and “Impact of Climate Change on Agricultural Production and Socio-economic Conditions in Rice-Growing Countries in Asia.” As of 1980, permanent staff and the intra- and extra-mural affiliates at CSEAS had undertaken over 150 projects. These encompassed religion, culture, anthropology, sociology, demography, history, linguistic, education, economics, agricultural economics, international relations, fauna and flora, paleontology, geology, geomorphology, soil science, hydrology, irrigation and drainage, agronomy, forest ecology, medical science, and pharmacology (Fourth Report 1977–1980 15th Anniversary Issue (Japanese only)).

In addition to research projects under the five-year research plan, CSEAS launched another five-year program in 1983 aimed at the acquisition of Southeast Asian vernacular library materials. With special funding from Monbusho, the center began to collect research materials of all kinds—books, magazines, periodicals, maps, and satellite images—and to organize them and make them available for public use. This program contributed to expanding the CSEAS library holdings and strengthening the library itself.

It was also at this stage that CSEAS received a grant from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) to enhance the exchange of scholars between Japan and Southeast Asian countries and to expand CSEAS’s research network in the region. A series of JSPS Core University Programs, “In Search of a Collaborative Framework for Southeast Asian Studies,” were initiated in 1986 within a bilateral framework of cooperation with Thammasat University. The first half of the program’s ten-year term covered the exchange of scholars between Japan and Thailand. By its fifth year, when the fourth seminar was held in 1991, the program had been expanded to other countries such as Indonesia and Malaysia. This reflected the changing academic context, with increasing intellectual interest among Southeast Asian scholars in their own neighbors. CSEAS has been extremely fortunate to work with many prominent scholars in the region through this program over the years.

Organizing a symposium in celebration of the 25th anniversary was not only an important occasion for highlighting the foregoing academic achievements of a number of joint studies, but also a symbolic challenge for CSEAS to seek a new mechanism for sustaining its institutional research framework, in light of changes in Monbusho’s funding scheme that introduced highly competitive grant funding in the early 1990s. Monbusho began to introduce the policy of selecting outstanding researchers and institutions and providing them with grants of a larger scale than the ordinary grants-in-aid for scientific research.

In 1993 CSEAS was selected as a core institution for a four-year project (1993–96) under the title of “An Integrated Approach to Global Area Studies: In Search of a Paradigm for a Harmonized Relationship between the World and Its Areas.” Generally referred to as “Global Area Studies,” this project was funded by Monbusho through the Grant for Scientific Research on Priority Areas. Although this program was designed mainly for promoting and supporting priority areas in natural and applied sciences, the CSEAS project was the first institutional proposal selected from the field of humanities and social sciences. This project involved some 130 area study specialists nationwide in an endeavor to delineate clearly the form and substance of global area studies and was managed as the fifth five-year project under the leadership of Professor Toru Yano, then director, and Professor Yoshihiro Tsubouchi, who succeeded Professor Yano as director following the latter’s resignation.

A round-table discussion under “Global Area Studies” project (1993–96) funded by Monbusho through the Grant for Scientific Research on Priority Areas.

In 1993 CSEAS confronted the gravest crisis in its history as an institution with the resignation of the sitting director following accusations of sexual harassment. This crisis spurred the center under the succeeding director, Professor Tsubouchi, to undertake internal reforms that resulted in a number of substantive changes: the establishment of Committees for Handling and Consulting on Sexual Harassment (later broadened to Workplace Harassment); the democratization of the decision-making process; the promotion of young faculty members; and the infusion of new minds, including the recruitment of women and non-Japanese scholars at the professor and associate professor levels.

CSEAS’s approach to education and training dates back to its second stage, in which the center’s staff were involved in collaborative teaching at the Division of Tropical Agriculture in the Graduate School of Agriculture. The division inaugurated a master’s program in April 1981 and a doctoral program two years later. Natural scientists among the center’s staff taught courses on tropical rice culture, tropical geography, and tropical hydrology. Unfortunately, the program was terminated following the major reorganization of the Graduate School of Agriculture in 1995.

The new monograph series Kyoto Area Studies on Asia is copublished by Kyoto University Press and Trans Pacific Press.

In the same year, 1998, CSEAS and ASAFAS were awarded a second large-scale research project for five years, the Center of Excellence (COE) Program (FY 1998–2002, approximately 700 million yen over five years) funded by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (formerly Monbusho, now called MEXT), to create a world-class research and educational center under the title of “Making Regions: Proto-Areas, Transformation, and New Formation in Asia and Africa.” The program was led by Professor Takashi Shiraishi, who joined the center in 1996. Emphasis was given to institution building and the development of a holistic way of studying and comparing world regions and understanding how regions evolved and how people changed over time.

COE’s institution-building activities included the expansion of library resources, networking, and publication initiatives. The libraries in both CSEAS and ASAFAS acquired 20,000 books per year during the course of the program, with the addition of large collections such as the Ocampo Collection on the Philippines (acquired from the Philippine historian Ambeth R. Ocampo); the microfiche collections of colonial documents from the former Netherlands East Indies and British Malaya; and vernacular materials from areas hitherto not covered such as southwest China, Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam. Publications from the program included several books in the Kyoto Area Studies on Asia series, as well as the founding of the Kyoto Review of Southeast Asia, a multilingual online journal that showcased debates and publications on Southeast Asian studies in Japanese, Bahasa Indonesia, Filipino, Thai, and English. Through the provision of financial support, this program also greatly contributed to the establishment of the research and educational base of the newly established graduate school, which had a strong component of fieldwork-based education.

In 2004, due to a government-mandated administrative reorganization of all national universities into autonomous and independent legal bodies, the academic structure at CSEAS underwent considerable reform.

A degraded peatland due to overlogging and fires (Source: Prof. Yamada Isamu, in Palangkaraya, Kalimantan, Central Indonesia, Aug, 2008).

The latest restructuring involved the elevation of the center’s administrative status from research center to institute, even though the center elected to retain its original name in English. The preparation for the transition from center to institute level was led by Professor Koji Tanaka, who was director at the time. The elevation of CSEAS to the status of institute was a result of MEXT’s recognition of the center’s great repute in the field of area studies.

Following the 21st Century COE, in 2007 the center received MEXT funding to initiate a five-year project for a Global COE program titled “In Search of Sustainable Humanosphere in Asia and Africa” (2007–11, 740 million yen over five years), which aimed at an integrated multidisciplinary approach to the humanosphere. Led by Professor Kaoru Sugihara, the Global COE program was carried out in collaboration with eight other institutions on campus: ASAFAS, the Research Institute for Sustainable Humanosphere, the Center for Integrated Area Studies, the Center for African Studies, the Institute of Sustainability Science, the Graduate School for Agriculture, the Institute for Research in Humanities, and the Graduate School of Engineering. This formed the basis of a campus-wide collaborative network for conducting research in Southeast Asia and other tropical regions.

This Global COE program marked a turning point in the center’s research in that there was a shift in emphasis in research from Southeast Asian studies for understanding Southeast Asia as a region and object of study to tackling questions emerging from the region that speak toward global issues. Research now begins from pressing realities and issues in the region, and aims to provide lessons and inspiration toward enhancing our knowledge and providing solutions toward a sustainable humanosphere at a global level. Such research can be accomplished only by even wider multidisciplinary collaboration than before, including in the hard sciences, while maintaining the field-based approach as well as cooperation with those outside academia. How can we reinforce and realize the potentialities of nature while controlling and managing it in coordination with others? How is plural coexistence of cultural, religious, and other differences possible? How can we better connect the knowledge and power of local communities to larger decisions and dynamics? How can we envision a better future in the region and around the globe? Topics such as environment, disaster and sustainability, democracy and governance, aging society and care, economic disparity and urban development involve multidisciplinary region-wide and cross-regional research. These are recognized as some of the big issues that Southeast Asian societies and the world more generally are now confronting. This Global COE project culminated in the publication of six edited volumes, 68 international symposia, 277 domestic workshops, and 127 working papers.

The IPCR-CSEAS program enabled CSEAS to spearhead the global search for and recruitment of talented, promising post-doctoral researchers. Another significant form of progress made by this program in conjunction with other means such as the JSPS Asian Core Program was the widening and strengthening of the center’s international networks, fostering cooperation among academic communities in Southeast Asia and East Asia and spurring a process that was set in motion over the years.

While previous JSPS Core University Programs had been designed as bilateral exchange, primarily with Thailand, the active exchanges and network building had far exceeded the bilateral framework. By the end of the second Core Program (1999–2008), the center was ready for a multi-lateral framework to widen its network. The Asian Core Program (2009–13) made this possible. In addition to Thailand represented by Thammasat, the Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI) and Taiwan’s CAPAS Academia Sinica joined to respectively represent mainland Southeast Asia, insular Southeast Asia, and East Asia. The program was titled “Asian Connections: Southeast Asian Model for Co-Existence in the 21st Century.” The projects reflected current debates and emerging issues, with such topics as cross-border connections and regionalism, politico-economic transformations, and resource management. While the projects were varied in their focus and outcome, a common realization was that in this region with rich ecological resources and varied social capital—characterized by plural coexistence along with globalization—negotiations and connections are made in dynamic and layered interfaces. These interfaces need to be analyzed as emerging on the ground rather than based on taken-for-granted units, paradigms, or indices.

It was during this period that the center relaunched and strengthened its journal and publications. The journal Southeast Asian Studies (Tonan Ajia Kenkyu), which had started in 1963 as a bilingual quarterly journal, gained international recognition as a peer-reviewed journal and received increasing numbers of submissions from all over the world. It is a one-of-a-kind journal that, true to the nature of the center, accepts contributions from across the sciences, social science, and humanities. In Japan, it was recognized among young scholars as the first significant step to one’s career as a scholar of Southeast Asia. In 2012, with due respect to the journal’s function and recognition, both domestic and international, the center opted to maintain the journal’s multidisciplinary content but re-fashion the journal by launching the triannual English journal Southeast Asian Studies and the biannual Japanese Journal of Southeast Asian Studies (Tonan Ajia Kenkyu), both peer-reviewed, open to contributions from scholars all over the world, and open-access. These journals showcase the best research conducted in the region.

In addition to the existing monograph series, in 2009—with the great cooperation of Dr. Paul Kratoska of NUS Press at the National University of Singapore and Kyoto University Press—the center launched the Kyoto CSEAS Series on Asian Studies. This was in recognition of the strong need for an Asia-based publication on Southeast Asian studies, in response to the rising quality and quantity of scholarship from the region. The series aims to reach a wide audience with innovative questions and analyses supported by meticulous research. It receives many submissions from around the world and in five years already counts 13 volumes.

CSEAS has actively sought not only to establish its reputation as the national hub for Southeast Asian studies in Japan, but also to cement its international reputation as a regional and global hub of Southeast Asian studies. Already blessed with deep roots and networks that link Japanese scholars to Southeast Asian scholars, CSEAS has, over the past decades, sought to strengthen its linkages with counterpart institutions in Northeast Asia through regular joint workshops organized with leading institutions such as Academia Sinica’s Center for Asia-Pacific Area Studies and the Korean Association of Southeast Asian Studies. CSEAS also expanded its institutional network by signing substantive memoranda of understanding with a number of institutions in China, South Asia, America, and Europe.

CSEAS’s position as an international hub was further strengthened by its role as partner institution in the Asian Public Intellectuals (API) program of the Nippon Foundation in 2000. API was initiated with the purpose of promoting the multi-lateral exchange of fellows from participating countries, sharing issues, exchanging ideas, learning from each other, connecting transnationally, and forming a community. Aimed at effective information sharing, discussion, and making an impact through raising voices together in a region faced with emergent issues in industrialization, environment and resource, poverty, discrimination, and conflict, API sought to nurture “public intellectuals,” a term that refers not only to academics but also to journalists, artists, NGOs, and civil activists, promoting exchange across disciplines as well as professions. The partner institutions were in Indonesia (Indonesian Institute of Sciences), Malaysia (Institute of Malaysian and International Studies at the National University of Malaysia), the Philippines (School of Social Sciences, Ateneo de Manila University), Thailand (Institute of Asian Studies, Chulalongkorn University), and Japan (CSEAS, Kyoto University). Each year several fellows were chosen from each country to be sent to one or more countries in the network. In the final three years, fellows from the CLMV countries were also selected. The program, came to an end in 2015, and created an alumni network of 338 fellows (58 from Japan) who form a multi-lateral network across the region. CSEAS contributed to the exchange program by hosting fellows, holding seminars, and hosting the partner institution office, but it also gained from the program, which enhanced the center’s role as a hub in the region.

The need for Southeast Asian studies is dramatically increasing. The ASEAN region is home to more than 600 million people and has become an important political and economic entity. The area, located in a tropical region, possesses a wealth of biomass resources provisioned by an abundant solar energy supply and is attracting attention as an area that owns new energy sources that are potential alternatives to fossil fuels.

By focusing on the political, economic, and ecological possibilities in the region, CSEAS is conscious of its responsibility to promote coexistence, environmental harmonization, energy and resource economization, and sustainable social development. Through its linkages and networks with universities and research institutions in the region, CSEAS hopes to pursue and promote knowledge in the region for the purpose of advancing knowledge for future generations around the world. Going into the 21st century, CSEAS has moved with the times, responding to imperatives that arise in Japan, the region, and the world.

In response to the perceived need to pursue scientific research, CSEAS, together with several graduate schools and research institute at Kyoto University, launched the “Japan-ASEAN Science, Technology and Innovation Platform (JASTIP): Promotion of Sustainable Development Research” within the framework of the Collaboration Hubs for International Research Program (CHIRP) in 2015 funded by the Strategic International Collaborative Research Program (SICORP) of Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST). JASTIP promotes Japan-ASEAN collaboration on science and technology research and accelerate the application of its outcomes to social innovation in order to achieve Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Through this and other initiatives, CSEAS continues to strengthen cooperative research and foster links between ASEAN and Japan; trains researchers to become leaders in their subsequent fields; and accelerates research that will be a driving force with the shared goal to attain sustainable development through closer collaboration between Japan and ASEAN countries.