The Nobel Prize and Japan - Part 3 Updated in January 2021

22 Japanese Winners in Three Fields of Natural Science

The value of the Nobel Prize lies in the winners of the three fields in natural science. The Nobel Foundation will not award a researcher unless it is an objective and undisputed result. Scientists around the world also have to acknowledged the result.
The attached table is a list of 22 Japanese laureates in the three fields of physics, chemistry, and physiology/medicine that have been awarded as of the time of this publication. Out of the 22, Nambu Yoichiro (2008) and Nakamura Shuji (2014) have been naturalized in the United States, but since they were born, raised, and educated in Japan, they are included here.

The Nobel Foundation refers to the medical award as the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine as stated in Alfred Nobel’s will, but in this article, we will refer to it as the medical prize.

Through the 20th century, up until the year 2000, the total number of Japanese laureates was six, but in the 21st century that figure has jumped to 16 recipients. What caused this increase? How long will this last? I would like to touch upon such points in this series.

Japanese Nobel Laureates in Natural Science
	Year	Name	Category	University	Graduate School	Reason
1	1949	Yukawa Hideki	Physics	Kyoto Univ.	Kyoto Univ.	Predicting the existence of mesons as mediators of the nuclear force acting between protons and neutrons
2	1965	Tomonaga Shin’Ichiro	Physics	Kyoto Univ.	Kyoto Univ.	Basic research in quantum electrodynamics: "super-many-time-theory " and "renormalization theory"
3	1973	Esaki Leo	Physics	The Univ. of Tokyo		Research on semiconductor/superconductor tunnel effect, and the development of Esaki diode
4	1981	Fukui Kenichi	Chemistry	Kyoto Univ.	Kyoto Univ.	Developed the "Frontier Orbital Theory" and contributed to the theoretical development of chemical reaction processes
5	1987	Tonegawa Susumu	Physiol/Med	Kyoto Univ.	Kyoto Univ.	Contributed to genetics and immunology by demonstrating "the theory that various antibody genes are reconstructed inside the body"
6	2000	Shirakawa Hideki	Chemistry	Tokyo Institute of Technology	Tokyo Institute of Technology	Development of molecular electronics through the discovery of conductive polymers
7	2001	Noyori Ryoji	Chemistry	Kyoto Univ.	Kyoto Univ.	Study of asymmetric hydrogenation by chiral catalyst; contribution for developing method to synthesize organic compounds
8	2002	Koshiba Masatoshi	Physics	The Univ. of Tokyo	The Univ. of Tokyo	Pioneering new astronomy by observing elementary particle neutrinos
9	2002	Tanaka Koichi	Chemistry	Tohoku Univ.		Development of methods to identify and to structurally analyze biopolymers
10	2008	Nambu Yoichiro	Physics	The Univ. of Tokyo	The Univ. of Tokyo	Discovering spontaneous symmetry breaking
11	2008	Kobayashi Makoto	Physics	Nagoya Univ.	Nagoya Univ.	Contribution to particle physics through discovering the origin of CP violation and the Kobayashi-Maskawa theory
12	2008	Maskawa Toshihide	Physics	Nagoya Univ.	Nagoya Univ.	Contribution to particle physics through discovering the origin of CP violation and the Kobayashi-Maskawa theory
13	2008	Shimomura Osamu	Chemistry	Nagasaki Medical College		Discovery of Green Fluorescent Protein (GFP) and contribution to life science
14	2010	Suzuki Akira	Chemistry	Hokkaido Univ.	Hokkaido Univ.	Development of cross-coupling
15	2010	Negishi Ei-ichi	Chemistry	The Univ. of Tokyo	Univ. of Pennsylvania	Development of cross-coupling
16	2012	Yamanaka Shinya	Physiol/Med	Kobe Univ.	Osaka City Univ.	development of the iPS cell
17	2014	Akasaki Isamu	Physics	Kyoto Univ.		Development of blue light-emitting diode
18	2014	Amano Hiroshi	Physics	Nagoya Univ.	Nagoya Univ.	Development of blue light-emitting diode
19	2014	Nakamura Shuji	Physics	Tokushima Univ.	Tokushima Univ.	Development of blue light-emitting diode
20	2015	Ōmura Satoshi	Physiol/Med	Univ. of Yamanashi	Tokyo Univ. of Science	Discovery of the antiparasitic drug ivermectin
21	2015	Kajita Takaaki	Physics	Saitama Univ.	The Univ. of Tokyo	Discovered that neutrinos have mass
22	2016	Ohsumi Yoshinori	Physiol/Med	The Univ. of Tokyo	The Univ. of Tokyo	Elucidation of the mechanism of autophagy

Looking up to Edison

Leo Esaki─the third Nobel Prize winner in Japan (1973)─was a scientist from a private company. His path to Nobel-level research was a rare one even at the time.

Most Nobel laureates are university researchers. It is natural for laureates to move up the academic ladder while moving to or from universities or research institutions, two or three times during their career. However, Esaki, who won the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physics, had only worked in private companies after graduation.

As a child, Esaki was impressed by the fact that music was played from the gramophone. He wanted to become like its inventor Thomas Edison. Although he did not succeed in his junior high school entrance examination, he afterwards found his motivation to study and graduated from the University of Tokyo (Department of Physics, Faculty of Science). While he was a student there, he witnessed the firebombing of the capital city in the Great Tokyo Air Raid (1945) of World War II. His boarding house was burned down by the US military bombing. After graduation, he aspired to rebuild Japan. He got a job at a private company because he wanted to contribute to industry.

After his graduation from the University of Tokyo in 1947, he joined a small company called Kobe Industries Corp (now Denso Ten), which manufactured vacuum tubes. Due to unstable management at the time, he left and got a job at Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo, which would later become Sony. Here, Esaki became an engineer focused on semiconductors. While he was producing semiconductors, he noticed that when the material germanium had a lot of impurities, the current flowed in the opposite direction. He questioned a slight anomalous current measured by an assistant from China and began to follow up on it thoroughly.

As he conducted his experiments, Esaki discovered that the current increases when the voltage is raised to a certain point. But when the voltage is raised further than that point, he saw that the current would decrease. He had discovered an abnormal negative resistance phenomenon. If there were negative resistance, it could be very valuable for industry. It can be used for switching, oscillation, and amplification. Esaki had theoretically proven the tunneling effect from the perspective of quantum mechanics, and succeeded in making the Esaki Diode for which he received the Nobel Prize. It was in 1957, just ten years after he graduated from university. He was 32 years old.

With this achievement, Esaki earned his long-sought doctoral degree, and at the age of 48, he won the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physics with Ivar Giaever (U.S.) and Brian David Josephson (U.K.).

Making a Breakthrough after Moving to IBM Before receiving the Nobel Prize, Esaki was transferred from Sony to IBM in the United States. He embarked on a new research experiment at IBM's Watson Research Institute. He made a breakthrough discovery there, publishing the semiconductor superlattice theory.

I (the author) first learned the importance of this result after asking Dr. Esaki myself in 1991. He told me that the research and development on semiconductor superlattices was developing rapidly. And, indeed, the number of citations related to Esaki’s 1970 paper on the superlattice theory rose suddenly in the 1990s.

At the time, I also heard from Mrs. Esaki that her husband, while attended a conference in Europe, was told by other physics laureates that “Leo might receive the Nobel Prize twice!”

A semiconductor superlattice refers to a structure in which thin crystals of semiconductors like gallium, arsenide and aluminum arsenic are layered. By combining the types of substances produced by the superlattice and the thickness of the film, various quantum effects can be obtained. Nowadays, it has become possible to make resonance tunnel effect transistors, and to apply it to laser oscillation diodes.

Nakamura Shuji (2014 Nobel Prize in Physics), a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who succeeded in commercializing the world's first blue light-emitting diode, also learned about Esaki’s theory and used an indium-gallium-nitrogen thin film as a light emitting layer. He succeeded in making a multiple quantum structure stacked on top of each other.

In 1970, Esaki compiled the world's first basic theory of superlattice and announced it at the International Society of Semiconductor Physics. Since 1984 or so, the number of citations began increasing rapidly around the world. In 1998, Esaki received the 14th Japan Prize. The reason for the award was his "Contribution to the development of new functional materials by creating and realizing the concept of artificial superlattice crystals". Winning this award often makes the recipient a leading candidate for the Nobel Prize. It is still considered possible for Esaki to receive the Nobel Prize a second time.

His Passion for Education as University of Tsukuba President

In 1992, Esaki was appointed President of the University of Tsukuba, a position which he held for six years. Based on his own experience, he actively voices comparisons in culture between Japan and the United States. He offers advice on the direction Japan should take from the theoretical standpoint of comparative education.

Esaki has many opportunities to give talks at seminars and symposiums for high school and university students. He never fails to introduce his "five points to remember if you want to win the Nobel Prize":

First, don't get caught up in what has already happened or clues you've already found.
Second, it's good to respect a great teacher, but don't obsess.
Third, get rid of unnecessary things and only keep information that is useful to you.
Fourth, you must take good care of yourself. Don’t be too compliant to others─sometimes you must not avoid fighting for yourself.
Fifth, we must never, ever lose our innocent sensibility and intellectual curiosity.

These five points advise young people to demonstrate originality with an individualistic attitude in the face of the hierarchical relationship structure deeply rooted in Japanese research institutions. Esaki states that the five points "are not satisfactory conditions for success”—rather, they are “indispensable conditions.” He says that establishing a paradigm for improving oneself will stir a person's way of life in the right direction.

"In the past, a well-educated person was a citizen who had acquired a lot of knowledge and wisdom from a million volumes of books, but nowadays a person is not necessarily well-educated just from their amount of knowledge. Someone who can redefine themselves while constantly absorbing new knowledge is a truly educated person,” Esaki said.

Original article by Rensei Baba, Science Journalist
Translated by the SSC Secretariat