[War & Business] Japan's Nobel Prizes

On the 5th (local time), Shukuro Manabe, a professor at Princeton University in the United States, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics. He became the 25th Japanese-born Nobel laureate in science, recognized for his contributions to global warming research.
[Image source=EPA·Yonhap News]

[Asia Economy Reporter Hyunwoo Lee] As Japan produces its 25th Nobel Prize winner in science, criticism is once again pouring down on South Korea's scientific community, blaming insufficient investment in basic science. The criticism that South Korea cannot produce as many Nobel laureates as Japan because it focuses only on applied sciences with high practicality while neglecting basic science is repeated every year.

However, in reality, South Korea is considered one of the countries investing the most in basic science in the international community. According to the country competitiveness data released in June by the Swiss International Institute for Management Development (IMD), South Korea ranked 2nd in scientific infrastructure, following the United States. This is much higher than Japan, which ranked 8th. South Korea surpasses Japan in all scientific infrastructure indicators, including the number of research and development (R&D) researchers per 1,000 people and total R&D investment relative to gross domestic product (GDP).

Overseas scientific communities describe South Korea's desire to win a Nobel Prize in science as excessive impatience. Japan's first Nobel Prize in science was awarded in 1949. Considering that it took more than 80 years since the Meiji Restoration in 1868, South Korea, which began full-scale scientific research in the 1970s, has too short a history in basic science to expect a Nobel Prize.

Japan actually started much earlier than South Korea in the field of science. Hideki Yukawa, a professor at Kyoto University who won Japan's first Nobel Prize in Physics in 1949, received the award for discovering the meson theory related to nuclear fission phenomena. He was able to discover this theory because he continued research from the secret nuclear weapons development project that Imperial Japan pursued before and after the outbreak of the Pacific War.

The fact that Japan has produced five Nobel laureates in Physiology or Medicine is also attributed to the significant development of Japanese medicine from the early 20th century. After 30,000 soldiers died from beriberi, a vitamin B deficiency disease, during the Russo-Japanese War in 1905 without even fighting, Japan devoted itself to investing in medicine and pharmaceutical technology. Since the 1940s, Japan's basic science, competing with Western powers, cannot be placed on the same level as South Korea's basic science, which has just taken its first steps.

It is said that Japan also went through numerous trials and errors in the early Meiji Restoration period to build its basic science. Overcoming various mistranslations and misunderstandings, such as translating the English word "Science" into "과학 (Gwahak)," a term that once referred to subjects in the civil service examination, Japan has digested and made it its own over 150 years, leading to today's Nobel Prizes.

No matter how much growth stimulants are applied, just as rice must be waited for until autumn to be harvested, perhaps our scientific community should be given time to grow first before being criticized.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.