Q45 As Japan ranked second in term of international patent applications, is it safe to say that it is a technology superpower? There are also Japanese science-related Nobel Prize winners, aren't there?

A45 Yes, there are many Japanese winners of the Nobel Prize for Physics and Chemistry. Hideki Yukawa, the first Japanese person to win a Nobel Prize, was awarded the prize in 1949 for predict-ing the existence of a particle-a meson-and its mass. The sub-sequent Japanese winners for physics and chemistry are Shinichiro

Tomonaga (1965, physics), Leona Esaki (1973, physics), Kenichi Fukui (1981, chemistry), Susumu Tonegawa (1987, medicine and physiology), Hideki Shirakawa (2000, chemistry), Ryoji Noyori (2001, chemistry), Masatoshi Koshiba (2002, physics)
and Koichi Tanaka (2002, chemistry).