Regions: Iraq
Researcher Profile
During my student years, I spent eleven months studying abroad in Kuwait, and inspired by Kozaburo Sawaki's travelogue Midnight Express which I had read in high school, I went backpacking to Egypt, Turkey, Israel, Morocco, and other countries.
When I was working at the Middle East Economic Research Institute — the predecessor to the current JIME Center — the Iraq War broke out. As news about Iraq swept the world and there were few Iraq specialists in Japan, I, then a junior researcher, was assigned to cover Iraq, and that has continued to the present day. While studying Iraq as my primary research subject, I was unable to visit Baghdad for a long time due to security concerns, so in 2012 I decided to visit Erbil, a relatively safe northern city. But what I found there was not "Iraq" as I expected; it was "Kurdistan" — a world that seemed like an entirely separate country. The surprise from that visit became the catalyst for me to subsequently pursue Kurdish studies alongside my Iraq research. My impressions from two field surveys in Erbil in 2012 are published in the "Thinking in the Field" column of Minpaku Monthly.
I have also taught courses on the Middle East at Takushoku University, Akita University, Aoyama Gakuin University, and Musashino University.
Career
- 2023 Ph.D. (Public Policy), Chiba University
- 2018 — Research Director, JIME Center (current)
- 2013 Senior Researcher, JIME Center
- 2007 Visiting Researcher, Gulf Research Center
- 2005 Researcher, JIME Center (then Foundation for Research on Energy Policy)
- 1999 Joined the Japan Middle East Economic Research Institute
- 1999 B.A. in Regional Cultural Studies (Middle Eastern Area Studies), Faculty of Foreign Studies, Osaka University of Foreign Studies
Selected Works
- BookCo-authored chapter in Governance without Government in the MENA Region: State, Non-State Actors and Evolving Paradigms (Moosa Elayah ed., Springer, 2026)
- ArticleArticle: "Economic Diplomacy of Iraq under the al-Sudani Administration: Development of Economic Cooperation with Various Countries and Its Background" (JIME Center, 2025)
- DissertationDoctoral Dissertation: "Hybrid Governance in Contemporary Iraq: Political Order in a Fragile State and the Role of Non-State Actors" (Chiba University, 2025)
- BookCo-authored chapter in The Kurdish Question: Possibilities and Limitations of Non-State Actors (Imai Kohei ed., Iwanami Shoten, 2022)
- BookCo-authored chapter in Iraq since the Invasion: People and Politics in a State of Conflict (Keiko Sakai, Philip Marfleet eds., Routledge, 2020)