I would first like to thank the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and the Nobel Foundation for awarding me this honour, of which I had never even dreamt.
I was born in 1940, the son of a furniture craftsman in a local city, Nagoya, in Japan. My father wanted to change his job and was taking a correspondence course to become an electrical engineer, while he was a trainee furniture craftsman. However, he told me that he could not really understand sine and cosine, since he had not received a basic education. Eventually, though, he did manage a small furniture factory employing a few craftsmen, and he worked there himself. But this came to nothing because of the war, that reckless and miserable war which our country caused.
After the war, he displayed in front of his house the door hinges, wood screws, and other pieces of furniture which remained at hand. They sold quite well. Getting a taste for selling, he became a merchant, dealing with sugar as an ingredient for cakes.
He still wanted to boast of his knowledge of electricity, but he could not find anyone suitable to explain it to. One day though, he found a good target: his son.
In those poor days after the war, almost all the houses were without bathrooms and so people went to the public bath. On his way to and from the public bath, he boasted of his know-A C H T U N G T R E N N U N G ledge: Why do three-phase current motors rotate? Why don't solar and lunar eclipses occur every month? He explained proudly that it was because of the revolution planes of the Earth around the Sun, and of the Moon around the Earth, which are tilted at an angle of 5 degrees.
This was the reason why I was a strange pupil at school. I had a poor record but could answer the teacher's questions when he digressed and spoke about subjects outside of the textbooks.
My parents neither observed their children carefully nor helped with their study. One day, my mother realised that she had never seen her son studying at home. So she told my teacher at a parent's association meeting. "Please give my son homework, at least occasionally. Otherwise, he never studies at home." My teacher answered, "Your son has never done his homework despite the fact that I give him homework every day!" Disastrous was that night. I got a two hour lecture from my parents.
An event that gave me a strong wish to become a physicist happened after I went on to high school. I went to high school with no strong motivation, but one day when I was in the first or second year, I found a newspaper article explaining [a] Prof.