Arakawa graduated from the Faculty of Letters at Kyoto University in 1995. He stayed on for graduate studies at Kyoto University, from where he received his doctorate in 2002. Since 2003 he has been teaching at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, with the position of associate professor since 2007.
Arakawa specializes in the study of the Tangut language, in particular Tangut phonology and the reconstruction of the pronunciation of Tangut characters. In 2006 he co-edited a Tangut-Russian-English-Chinese dictionary with Evgenij Ivanovich Kychanov, for which he provided the reconstructed Tangut readings. He has also published a number of studies of bilingual Tangut-Tibetan texts.
In 2016 Arakawa received the prestigious Kyōsuke Kindaichi Memorial Award (金田一京助博士記念賞) for his study of the Tangut version of the Diamond Sutra. (Source Accessed April 15, 2025)
