Soichiro Honda was a Japanese industrialist and engineer. He is credited with establishing the world-renowned automobile manufacturer, Honda Motor Co., Ltd. He is also credited with overseeing the company's growth from a wooden shack manufacturing unit to a multinational conglomerate manufacturer of motorcycle and automobile. Soichiro Honda was made an inductee of the Automotive Hall of Fame in 1989.
Jiro Horikoshi was a Japanese engineer who played an important role during the Second World War, serving as the chief engineer of several Japanese fighter aircraft, including the famous Mitsubishi A6M Zero. Jiro Horikoshi's life and career inspired a fictionalized biographical animated film titled The Wind Rises which was directed by Hayao Miyazaki.
Born into a family of Japanese politicians that has been compared to the Kennedy family of the U.S., Yukio Hatoyama has served as Japan’s prime minister and as the Democratic Party president. An engineer, who later obtained a PhD from Stanford, he has also taught at a few universities earlier.
Japanese computer scientist Yukihiro Matsumoto, better known as Matz, soared to fame for designing the Ruby programming language. He works for the open-source company Netlab.jp and has created many open-source products, such as cmail. He has also worked as a missionary for the LDS Church.
Japanese businessman and industrial engineer Ohno Taiichi is remembered for his efforts toward the reduction of muda, or waste, and the implementation of the kanban, or just-in-time system in Toyota. His popular books on manufacturing include Toyota Production System and Just-in-Time for Today and Tomorrow.
The founder of Level-5, video game designer Akihiro Hino began his career as a programmer and later designed popular games such as the Dark Cloud series and the Professor Layton series. He has designed for major console brands such as PlayStation 2, Nintendo DS, and PlayStation Portable.
Isamu Akasaki was a Japanese physicist and engineer. Isamu, who specializes in semiconductor technology, won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2014 along with Shuji Nakamura and Hiroshi Amano. Isamu Akasaki also won other prestigious awards like the Kyoto Prize, IEEE Edison Medal, Charles Stark Draper Prize, and Asia Game Changer Award.