My favorite word for new students: Independence

Q: Why did you choose this word?

When I look back on my time as a student, I remember coming to Nagoya from Hamamatsu, staying in a lodging house for the first time, paying the electricity and gas bills by myself, cooking for myself, going to a public bath, buying a moped, etc. My days were full of firsts, and each event was exciting and fun. I think that being a university student is a special time in one's life when one can gain various experiences to become an independent member of society.

Q: It has been four years since you won the Nobel Prize in Physics. What type of research are you currently conducting?

I am still working on the same material, gallium nitride (GaN), which not only glows blue, but when applied to transistors, has been shown to be very efficient in converting direct current to alternating current and in sending and receiving a lot of information at once compared to conventional materials. My research is aimed at building a more convenient social infrastructure without wasting fossil fuels.

Q: When you were in high school, what made you want to enter a science (engineering) department?

When I was in high school, I loved mathematics, so there was a time when I longed to study mathematics in the School of Science. However, as I approached the entrance examinations, I changed my path to the Department of Electrical Engineering in the School of Engineering, because this field of study is closer to the real world and I used to play amateur radio in junior high school.

Q: What was the moment when you thought that research was interesting?

Everything about my research on blue LEDs, which I started in my fourth year, was fun. I had been conducting experiments as part of the university curriculum, but they were all given to me and the results were known. In comparison, the research on blue LEDs was new to me and it was very fresh at the time. In particular, I enjoyed assembling the device for making crystals. We built it together with Mr. Yasuo Koide, who is currently a director of the National Institute for Materials Science [as of 2018] and one year my senior. We also had to obtain missing parts from other laboratories, process quartz and graphite by ourselves, and devise our own heating coils. Thinking back, I wish I could return to those days. There were times when we were allowed to visit laboratories that were using commercially available expensive equipment, and we were excited to try to incorporate the best parts of their equipment into our own. The crystals we produced were cloudy white, and my supervisor said, "Your crystals look like frosted glass," but when I looked at them under the microscope, they had many different shapes. I was fascinated.

Q: Looking back on your time as a student, what is your most memorable memory?

I do not remember which professor gave the lecture, but in the introduction to engineering when I was a first year undergraduate student, he explained the meaning of the letter "engineering," which is to connect a person to another (from the construct of the Kanji character, you can interpret it as "connecting one-to-one"). Until I was in high school, I did not understand the meaning of studying and spent my time in a half-hearted way, but after that lecture, I started liking studying very much and the world began to look different.

Q: I heard that you like to read. Do you have any book recommendations (and why these)?

What you want to read and what you should read change with age. At the time, I used to read a lot of Blue Backs, but now I would recommend Stephen R. Covey's "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People." When I was on sabbatical at Sandia National Laboratories in the US for three months, my host Mr. Han recommended this book to me. When I was busy and had to do many things at the same time, I started by thinking about what my top priority was, and it helped me to consider what I live for and how I should live my life on a regular basis to realize my goals.

Q: Is there anything you regret not doing when you were a student?

There are many things, but if I had to choose one, I would say that I wish I had gone abroad. I did not have the luxury of time in my life, so I did not have the experience to go abroad during my undergraduate and master's programs. Now, thinking about it, I strongly believe that I should have learned earlier that there are many worlds out there that differ from Japan.

Q: Do you have a message for new students and prospective students at Nagoya University?

There are infinite possibilities in your future. Whether or not you seize these possibilities depends on your constant efforts and willingness to take on challenges. In my own research, I believe that by experiencing many failures earlier than others, I was able to arrive at things that others had not done. I believe that university is the place where you can experience failure. I hope that you will challenge yourself to do whatever you want, experience many failures, and learn a lot from them.