Born in Yamaguchi-Ken, Shigeaki Sugeta graduated in Literature in 1957 from the Department of English Language and Literature at
Waseda University in
Tokyo, and again in Literature in 1959 in the Department of Glotology from the
University of Tokyo. From 1962 to 1964 he was a scholarship holder of the Italian government at the
University of Florence, where he attended
Bruno Migliorini's lessons. In 1964, for the first time, he arrived in
Sardinia and began studying the
Sardinian language. During the years he travelled to Sardinia many other times, talking in fluent Sardinian with the locals. From 1993 to 1997 he was Director of the Japanese Society of Romance Linguistics (Societas Japonica Studiorum Romanicorum), and he taught for years in his professorships of General, Romance and Italian at the University of Waseda. At Waseda University he has been teaching Sardinian courses for 31 years, and to help his students he created the first Sardinian-Japanese vocabulary in 1984. The same dictionary, with the addition of translations into Italian, was published again by the publishing house "Edizioni della Torre" in 2000. In 2003 he collaborated with the
University of Cagliari, organizing an international conference dedicated to the language and culture of Sardinia at the University of Waseda, thanks to a
memorandum of understanding stipulated in 2002. In 2002 he became a consultant to the Institute of Italian Studies at the University of Waseda. In 2010 he gave a lectio magistralis at the Ciusa Institute of
Nuoro about
Sardinian, where he declared himself in favor of unification and standardization of its orthographies to save it from extinction. He also talked about how he began to know and appreciate it. == Publications ==