Nobel Laureates of Japan

The Nobel Prize is widely regarded as the most prestigious award in the fields of physics, chemistry, medicine, peace, literature, and economics. The set of annual international awards are bestowed by Swedish and Norwegian institutions in recognition of academic, cultural, or scientific advances. The will of the Swedish scientist Alfred Nobel established the prizes in 1895. According to his will, Alfred Nobel’s enormous fortune was to be used to establish prizes to award those who had done their best to benefit mankind in the fields of physics, chemistry, medicine, literature and peace.

The first Nobel Prizes were awarded in 1901, five years after Nobel's death. Till date 26 Japanese individuals or persons of Japanese birth have been awarded the Nobel Prize – 11 in Physics, 7 in Chemistry, 4 in Physiology or Medicine, 3 in Literature, and 1 in Peace.

This booklet brings a brief account of the laureates’ life and work.

Physics

• Hideki Yukawa, 1949
• Sin-Itiro Tomonaga 1965
• Leo Esaki, 1973
• Masatoshi Koshiba, 2002
• Makoto Kobayashi, 2008
• Yoichiro Nambu, 2008
• Toshihide Maskawa, 2008
• Isamu Akasaki, 2014
• Hiroshi Amano, 2014
• Shuji Nakamura, 2014
• Takaaki Kajita, 2015
  
  Chemistry
• Kenichi Fukui, 1981
• Hideki Shirakawa, 2000
• Ryoji Noyori, 2001
• Koichi Tanaka, 2002
• Osamu Shimomura, 2008
• Ei-ichi Negishi, 2010
• Akira Suzuki, 2010
  
  Literature
• Yasunari Kawabata,1968
• Kazuo Ishiguro, 2017
• Kenzaburo Oe, 1994
  
  Physiology or Medicine
  
• Susumu Tonegawa, 1987
• Shinya Yamanaka, 2012
• Satoshi Omura, 2015
• Yoshinori Ohsumi, 2016   
  

Peace

• Eisaku Sato, 1974