Yukiko Abe Hatasa received her Ph.D. in linguistics in 1992 from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. She has taught all levels of Japanese for over twenty five years, and has worked on curriculum development and teacher training in five major institutions in the US, Australia, and Japan. She is known nationwide, as one of the premier Japanese methodologists in the US and Japan. She is currently a professor of Japanese pedagogy at Hiroshima University.