I dream that a day will come when I invent an IC stepper or scanner no one envisaged before.
Conduct research with optimism, but also with persistence.
What do you think is required to be a researcher?
A book titled Wakaki sugakusha no Amerika or Young Mathematician Living in America, written by Masahiko Fujiwara, which I read during my university days, stamped a great impression on me. It mentions four basic attributes that a researcher requires: To be intellectually curious, ambitious, optimistic and persistent.
Do you think this fits in with your attributes?
I remember that I felt I had such attributes when I read the book. Even in my childhood, I was a curiosity seeker, finding fun in every opportunity, nurturing a dream to be a researcher.
Being optimistic, but persistent at the same time, seems quite a big contradiction.
Does it? I am essentially an optimist. When I hit a problem I cannot immediately solve, I stop thinking about it. I put it aside for a while. But I keep it somewhere in my mind that I have an issue unresolved. Then, a solution may jump into my mind all of a sudden one day a few years later. I think researchers need such persistence to never give up once their mind is made up. To hold a belief so as to never concede defeat, you must have a view that you will have a positive business result at the end of this hardship. You can succeed with this attitude and tackle any challenge facing you.
You mentioned earlier in this interview about the need for researchers to foresee changes in markets. Do you approach this with the same attitude?
Yes, I do.
Nikon culture never gets trapped by conventional concepts.
Could you give any advice to members of the young generation who are dreaming of becoming researchers some day?
Question conventional concepts is my advice. Conventional concepts are a kind of wisdom acquired by people’s experiences over the long term. But you have to realize that the basis of the concepts of the age changes as time goes by. Particularly in the field of innovations of technologies, the accepted ideas of the time could suffer changes during harsh competition. The conventional concept at Nikon before the immersion scanner was developed was that it would be difficult to bring immersion lithography technology to practical use in the field. If we had become entrapped by this accepted idea at the time, we would have been unable to go beyond the boundary that we did eventually break. Development might then have been very much delayed.
Do you think that Nikon people are free of the "trap of conventional concepts" of the current time? And is this Nikon culture?
Yes, it is. I know of various potential technologies that remain unused by Nikon. This is the power of Nikon. Once someone finds a possibility of a breakthrough, many experts in various sections at Nikon gather together to start a project, leaving the conventional concepts of the past behind. When I first came up with the idea of the immersion scanner, tens of people were working with me after a year to start the project. Nikon’s culture and tradition is to make a quick decision when it is judged appropriate, and then put every force and energy into it.
What dream do you entertain in your field of research?
I previously mentioned ambition as an important attribute for a researcher. I have a big ambition myself. It is to create something that is currently beyond human imagination; like the digital revolution in the camera industry was. I’d like to bring such a revolutionary technological change to the IC steppers and scanners industry.
On a visit to England
When do you imagine such a dream will come true?
Well, I can’t tell. And even if I knew, I still couldn’t tell. (Laughs)
Are there any dreams you’d like to fulfill outside your laboratory work?
I always love to see beautiful things — landscapes, paintings in galleries, stars in the sky, or whatever. I really enjoy beautiful scenery, particularly when I am traveling abroad. So, what I’d like to do now is to go on a trip overseas, visiting towns and the countryside in various countries.