







The Most Famous
Physicists from Japan
This page contains a list of the greatest Japanese Physicists. The pantheon dataset contains 851 Physicists, 20 of which were born in Japan. This makes Japan the birth place of the 9th most number of Physicists behind Netherlands and Austria.
Top 10 Physicists
The following people are considered by Pantheon to be the top 10 most legendary Japanese Physicists of all time. This list of famous Japanese Physicists is sorted by HPI (Historical Popularity Index), a metric that aggregates information on a biography's online popularity. Visit the rankings page to view the entire list of Japanese Physicists.
- #1

Hideki Yukawa
1907 - 1981
HPI 73.0686 langsHideki Yukawa was a Japanese theoretical physicist who is most famous for his theory of mesons. He also predicted the existence of quarks.
- #2

Isamu Akasaki
1929 - 2021
HPI 72.3470 langsAmu Akasaki is most famous for being the inventor of the blue LED.
- #3

Shin'ichirō Tomonaga
1906 - 1979
HPI 72.3174 langsShin'ichirō Tomonaga is most famous for his work in quantum electrodynamics, specifically the Tomonaga-Schwinger equation.
- #4

Yoichiro Nambu
1921 - 2015
HPI 71.4068 langsYoichiro Nambu is most famous for his work on the theory of spontaneous broken symmetry.
- #5

Makoto Kobayashi
b. 1944
HPI 70.9062 langsMakoto Kobayashi is most famous for being the first person to climb Mount Everest without supplemental oxygen.
- #6

Leo Esaki
b. 1925
HPI 70.4773 langsLeo Esaki is most famous for his invention of the Esaki Diode in 1959.
- #8

Masatoshi Koshiba
1926 - 2020
HPI 68.8472 langsMasatoshi Koshiba is most famous for his discovery of the neutrino. He won the Nobel Prize in 2002 for this discovery.
People by Birth Decade
Browse notable Japanese Physicists grouped by birth decade. Each decade shows the top 10 by HPI; expand to see everyone.
1960s(1)
1950s(2)
1930s(2)
1920s(7)
1910s(1)
1890s(1)
1860s(1)
Overlapping Lives
Which Physicists were alive at the same time? This visualization shows the lifespans of the 10 most globally memorable Physicists since 1700.











