Akihito Uebayashi was born in Awaji Island, Hyogo, Japan, in 1984, where he resided until the completion of his high school education. He pursued his graduate studies in Pedagogy at Kyoto University of Education, Japan. Upon completion of his master’s degree, he embarked on his career in Japanese language education in 2010, serving as an instructor for the Evening Japanese Language Course at the International Student Center of Hokkaido University, Japan. After a year-long tenure in the agricultural machinery export sales department of a Japanese trading company, he returned to academia in 2016. From 2017 to 2020, he held the position of full-time lecturer in the Department of Japanese Language and Literature, Faculty of Letters at Erciyes University, Turkey. Between 2020 and 2023, he contributed to the establishment of the Japanese Language Department at Sapporo AOBA Vocational College in Japan. Since 2023, he has held his current position at the Japanese Studies Course of FFZG. His research interests include: 1) promoting international exchange and intercultural understanding through Japanese language education, and 2) conducting dialectological studies on the Awaji Island dialect in Japan. He has been proactive in delivering lectures on the Kansai dialect across various countries on the Balkan Peninsula. Since 2022, he has been involved in providing online Japanese language learning support for Ukrainian refugees in Japan through the GSSC Nihongo Club. In his leisure time, he enjoys playing the ukulele and learning foreign languages, including Portuguese, Spanish, Mandarin, Turkish, and Croatian.
