Hiroyuki Yanagihashi is Professor at the Graduate School of Humanities and Sociology, the University of Tokyo. He worked for the Consulate General of Japan in Jedda in 1986―87. Then he was appointed as an Associate Professor at Ibaraki University and Tohoku University. In 2010 he was appointed as a Professor at the University of Tokyo. He serves also as the Representative Director of the Association for Islamic Studies in Japan from 2014.

He is the author of A History of the Early Islamic Law of Property (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2004) and Studies in Legal Hadith (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2019) in addition to some articles in Islamic Law and Society and the books on the Islamic law of family and property in general in Japanese. His current research focuses on ḥadīth from quantitative perspectives.

He received the degree of Master of Arts from the University of Tokyo.