Factbox: Japanese winners of Nobel Prizes
By Antoni Slodkowski TOKYO (Reuters) - Isamu Akasaki and Hiroshi Amano of Japan and Japanese-born U.S. citizen Shuji Nakamura won the 2014 Nobel Prize for Physics on Tuesday for inventing a new energy-efficient and environment-friendly light source. Here is a list of previous Japanese-born Nobel laureates. PHYSICS: 1949 - Hideki Yukawa – for his prediction of the existence of mesons - subatomic particles intermediate in mass between electron and proton. 1965 - Shinichiro Tomonaga - for fundamental work in quantum electrodynamics. 1973 - Leo Esaki - for discoveries on tunneling phenomena in semiconductors and superconductors. 2002 - Masatoshi Koshiba - for pioneering contributions to astrophysics. 2008 - Yoichiro Nambu, Makoto Kobayashi, Toshihide Maskawa - for insights providing deeper understanding of what happens in the tiniest building blocks of matter. CHEMISTRY: 1981 - Kenichi Fukui - for theories on the course of chemical reactions. 2000 - Hideki Shirakawa - for discovery and development of conductive polymers - a plastic that conducts electricity like a metal. 2001 - Ryoji Noyori - for work on chirally catalysed hydrogenation reactions. 2002 - Koichi Tanaka - for development of a method that helps identify the amount and type of chemicals present in a sample of biological macromolecules. 2008 - Osamu Shimomura - for discovery and development of the green fluorescent protein. 2010 - Akira Suzuki - for inventing new ways to bind carbon atoms. MEDICINE: 1987 - Susumu Tonegawa - for discovery of genetic principle for generation of antibody diversity. 2012 - Shinya Yamanaka - for discovery that adult cells can be transformed back into embryo-like stem cells that may one day regrow tissue in damaged organs. LITERATURE: 1968 - Yasunari Kawabata 1994 - Kenzaburo Oe PEACE: 1974 - Eisaku Sato - Signed the nuclear arms Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in 1970. (Source - http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/lists/countries.html) (Reporting by Antoni Slodkowski, Editing by Angus MacSwan)
