On October 5, 2026, it was announced that the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine would go to three professors at Stanford University in the US. Their research on “optogenetics” and related work was recognized, but no Japanese researcher was among the winners. Reactions poured into 5ch’s “News Flash+” board right after the announcement, ranging from jokes about the Ig Nobel Prize, to worries over Japan’s shrinking basic-research funding and brain drain, to the now-annual running joke about Haruki Murakami “failing” to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, to the names of quantum-gravity researchers seen as future Nobel contenders.
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for this year was just announced, going to three professors at Stanford University in the US for their research on “optogenetics” and related work.
No Japanese researcher was among the winners.
Nippon TV News, October 5, 2026, 18:38
Source: news.ntv.co.jp / Original article here
The Ig Nobel gets mocked a lot, but under its philosophy that "a joke is funnier the more seriously you do it," they actually put real Nobel laureates on the selection committee — so the picks are made pretty seriously.
Too bad.
If a bunch more sleep-related brain hormones get discovered down the road, and their mechanisms and how they relate to each other get worked out, the day might come when Professor Masashi Yanagisawa's research gets honored as the discovery that first opened that door.
Everyone's just living their whole world through AI and the internet now.
There's no future in that.
It's not just this year — Japan's always been disconnected from the Nobel anyway.
Japan's strongest contender has been Yoko Tawada for years now.
The toxic humanities-track bureaucrats (i.e., Ministry of Finance officials) have been slashing research grants hard, leaving basic research out in the cold, while the pool of promising young researchers flees into clinical medicine instead — and we're about to enter the generation shaped by exactly that. From now on, Japan's Nobel laureates will be limited to the rare brilliant ones who either deliberately skipped med school, or went to med school but got hooked on basic research anyway, and went on to do great work in the US. So the numbers are going to drop off a cliff.
Is it becoming the Haruki Murakami of physiology?
There's a theory that GLP-1 has too many co-discoverers tied for credit, so they're just waiting for some of them to die off first (the Nobel can only be split among three living people at once).
About the only one won with home-grown Japanese funding was Kamiokande.
Mr. Nishizawa's already dead lol
He probably resents the Patent Office so much he can't rest in peace — his soul's gotta still be wandering around.
Did Shosaku Numa turn into a jibakurei too? (a "ground-bound" ghost said to haunt one fixed spot)
Given the timing of China and Korea's science investment, probably a bit further down the line?
…wait, am I not supposed to give a serious answer here? lol
It's merit-based, so wins in the science categories are probably a no-go for them…
China and Korea still barely invest in basic research even now.
Is whether they're Japanese or not literally the only thing you care about?
Even if they printed the names, nobody'd care unless they were Japanese anyway.
– Went to public school
– Not from Tokyo
Noyorin (Nobel chemist Ryoji Noyori's nickname) be like: "…"
There's more:
– Holds an undergrad degree from a national university
And the ones who pulled it off coming from Nada or Doshisha high schools are legit greats.
They just can't get on the AI-building side of things.
That's why they're resorting to sour-grapes lines like "true intellectuals don't build AI, they craft the prompts" lol
There's Sakana AI, you know.
You could become a seriously high-performance AI orchestra conductor with that.
Even busting a gut now, there's no catching up to America.
Apparently even China can't do it.
Word is China's trying to copy its way there through hacking, but that's supposedly a lost cause too lol
Hmm… the science and info departments at the old Imperial universities are weak right now.
Tokyo University's Matsuo lab (AI researcher Yutaka Matsuo) has gone chasing money, and Kyoto University's got a handful of people doing somewhat interesting stuff here and there.
And it'd be great if Masamichi Kasa and Tadashi Takayanagi won for the Ryu-Takayanagi formula, the most important equation behind the holographic principle.
If the holographic principle itself ever won, it'd be an absolute sensation.
The holographic principle is still just a theoretical story for now, so that looks like a stretch.
The holographic principle itself is hard to prove or disprove, much like superstring theory, M-theory, or multiverse theory, so it'd be tough for giants like Juan Maldacena, Leonard Susskind, or Edward Witten to win specifically for the holographic principle. But just like Roger Penrose won the Nobel in Physics for black hole research, Kasa and Takayanagi do have a real shot at winning for quantum gravity theory.
Background and Key Points of This Discussion
“Optogenetics” is a technique that uses light to control the activity of specific nerve cells, and it has been widely used in basic brain-science research. On the thread, the lack of a Japanese winner sparked concern that cuts to basic-research funding and the flow of talented researchers into clinical medicine would mean fewer future Japanese laureates — though that claim drew pushback too, with some arguing that most past Japanese Nobel-winning work was actually done in overseas labs, so opinions were split. The running joke that Haruki Murakami “loses out” on the Nobel Prize in Literature every year is a seasonal fixture on this board, and this year posters also noted that a South Korean woman writer had already won it first. It’s worth noting that at the time of the thread, only the names and brief outline released in the initial news flash were available, so the details cited within the thread are limited to that scope.
※This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (News Flash+) thread “[Breaking] Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine Goes to Three US Stanford University Professors — Researched “Optogenetics” and More“.
