Boonsithi Chokwatana is the Chairman of Saha Group, Thailand's leading consumer products conglomerate. This is part 27 of a 30-part series .

The project to attract an international school to Sriracha, in eastern Thailand, fizzled, and we eventually constructed a golf course on the planned site.

But Saha still owned a great deal of unused land there, including in surrounding areas.

"If we're going to do something, why not do something with Japan, with which we have a close relationship, as the theme?"

This thought led to the idea of a shopping complex called J-Park.

We took a cue from Italian Town, built in the resort district of Khao Yai, a north east suburb of Bangkok.

In Italian Town, everything from buildings to restaurants, grocery stores and plantings are European-style. Its selling point is said to be that visitors can feel as if they have traveled abroad while being in Thailand.

At the time, smartphones began to be widely used in Thailand, and Italian Town was gaining in popularity as a good spot to take selfies to post on social media.

Another thought: "What if we can create a place where people can similarly enjoy themselves while feeling as if they are visiting Japan?" With the cooperation of people from Japanese lingerie maker Wacoal, we sent an inspection team to Toei Kyoto Studio Park, a movie studio theme park built by the Toei production house.

Toei Kyoto Studio Park has an outdoor set that accurately reproduces an Edo period streetscape. It is a pioneer theme park in Japan and is actually used to film period dramas.

J-Park, which opened in 2013, was also built while imagining Kyoto in the Edo period. There is a red wooden bridge over a pond where nishikigoi ornamental carp swim gracefully. The aisle is decorated with Japanese daruma dolls and lanterns.

The roof of a building that imitates the reliquary hall of Kinkakuji (which literally means Temple of the Golden Pavilion) in Kyoto is one of the attractions at J-Park.

Although a statue of a phoenix is perched on the roof of the original reliquary hall, a golden statue of an ox sits neatly on ours. I heard that a person in charge demonstrated a sense of fun in tribute to my Japanese zodiac sign.

We deploy koinobori carp streamers and hydrangea in early summer. We have leaves that change colors in the autumn and nighttime illumination displays in winter. We wanted to make J-Park a place where people can enjoy eating and shopping while feeling Japan's four seasons and culture.

Around the time we began to consider J-Park, there was talk about opening a branch of the Japanese School in the east of Thailand.

The Japanese School (Thai Japanese Association School in Bangkok), whose predecessor is Bangkok Japan Elementary School, was founded in 1926, before World War II. It is the world's oldest and largest single Japanese school.

But with the acceleration of Japanese companies setting up in Thailand, the number of students at the school exceeded 3,000 at one point, making it difficult to accept more students.

Many of the employees of these companies work in the eastern coastal industrial zone; they and their families live in Bangkok, where the Japanese School is located, and spend one or two hours driving to work.

If there was a branch school in the east of Thailand, it would be possible for these employees to bring their homes closer to their workplaces. But those who were talking about opening the branch were facing difficulty securing land for it.

Hearing that, I decided to offer 32,000 sq. meters of idle land near J-Park almost free of charge (we could not legally offer the land completely free of charge). The 8,000-sq.-meter lot was offered on a chargeable basis and was sold at around one-third the usual transaction price.

The Sriracha School (Thai Japanese Association School Sriracha) opened in 2009 with 91 students; it currently has about 500 students.

Demand from Japanese families for local residences grew rapidly. Therefore, we partnered with Japan's Tokyu Group to develop a housing area across from the branch school exclusively for them.

The area is fully equipped with a security system, park, swimming pool and gym. Some 180 households can live as good of lives or even better there than in Japan.

Sriracha is now home to a commercial facility, a school and a housing area for Japanese as well as a cluster of industrial parks housing many Japanese companies.

I wonder if Sriracha is, so to speak, a modern version of the "Japantown" that prospered in the historic city of Ayutthaya, where Japanese adventurer Nagamasa Yamada shined during the Edo period.

Sriracha will also have a stop along the high-speed railway that is now under construction to reduce the travel time between the capital and Thailand's bustling eastern seaboard.

For the Japanese residents, I am hoping their new community takes on a different character than the one in Bangkok and they become part of a big city that continues to develop.

This column is part of The Nikkei's "My Personal History" ("Watashi no Rirekisho") series of autobiographies. The series first appeared in The Nikkei in 1956. Since then, a wide variety of world-changing individuals have written or dictated their life stories for publication.