Stockholm - For Japan, yesterday's announcement that Hideki Shirakawa had shared in the Nobel Prize for chemistry was a rare accolade in an area that has often eluded them.
Shirakawa, an honorary professor at Tsukuba University northeast of Tokyo, was only the ninth Japanese ever to win a Nobel Prize and the first since 1994 when Kenzaburo Oe won the prize for literature.
Zhores Alferov, a Communist politician and the first Russian to win a Nobel prize since Mikhail Gorbachev a decade ago, said yesterday his physics award was a belated tribute to Soviet science.
Alferov and two American scientists - Herbert Kroemer and Jack Kilby - shared the 2000 Nobel Physics prize for pioneering research in information technology and paving the way for computers, CD players and mobile telephones.