What Japan’s Nobel Laureates Can Teach Founders: Detail, Dedication, and Fulfillment Beyond Money

Why does Japan rank third in the world for Nobel laureates? Two prominent characteristics of Japan’s research culture are craftsmanship and a stronger pursuit of academic reputation than wealth. Why do scientists also need a craftsperson’s dedication? Many years ago, Wu Jun attended a doctoral student’s dissertation-proposal presentation at Tsinghua University. After hearing it, Wu’s teacher, Professor Zhu Xuelong, said that the topic was good, but he hoped the student would conduct the research more carefully. The student should learn from the Germans, investigating every detail thoroughly and understanding it clearly. Later, when Wu read German research papers, he found that they really did pay close attention to detail. Many scientific discoveries come from finding problems—and answers—in the details. In Japan, you can often see very elderly professors arriving at their offices shortly after six in the morning. Sometimes they spend weekends in the laboratory, focused on experiments just as on any ordinary day. Why can they spend years doing research that seems so tedious to outsiders? Because they feel they have not yet perfected every detail. Nobel laureate Yoshinori Ohsumi is one example. He devoted more than forty years to studying yeast. As a young man, he happened to learn that someone was investigating DNA replication in yeast cells, and he became deeply interested in the subject. From then on, he continued studying yeast in a small laboratory. After more than twenty years of effort, he unraveled the mystery of autophagy in yeast. Cellular autophagy is involved in human metabolism, engulfing foreign material, preventing infection, and clearing dead cells, among other processes, making it a very important subject. In 2016, when the Nobel committee notified him of the award, the seventy-one-year-old professor was still working hard in the laboratory. Although he was already well known in academia, almost no one in Japan knew him, and he was not well off. He could work steadily without caring about fame or money simply because he wanted to do things better. If you examine the lives of Japan’s Nobel science laureates, their stories are much like Ohsumi’s. In 2002, the previously obscure Koichi Tanaka astonished Japan by winning the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Before that, he had simply been an ordinary employee at Shimadzu. Tanaka had been especially interested in experiments since high school. After graduating from university, he joined Shimadzu to work in research and development. To continue his research, he passed up several opportunities for promotion and worked quietly in a hands-on research role for twenty years. His work eventually brought the company approximately RMB100 million in profit, but his reward was only JPY10,000, around RMB700. He did not mind and continued to enjoy his research. There are deep reasons why Japan has won so many Nobel science prizes over the past twenty years. #吳軍來信2 [Wu Jun’s Letters, 2] ---- Robin: “Looking at entrepreneurship through Japan’s Nobel laureates: pay attention to detail—the devil is in the details. Find problems and answers in those details. Love a project and devote yourself to it, rather than seeking only financial returns. A true sense of achievement goes beyond money.”