[Provisional translation]

The decision has been made to award this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics to Dr. Isamu Akasaki, Professor at Meijo University and Distinguished Professor at Nagoya University, Dr. Hiroshi Amano, Professor at Nagoya University, and Dr. Shuji Nakamura, Professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
I offer my sincere congratulations upon the awarding of this honor to the 20th, 21st, and 22nd Nobel laureates from Japan.
This award reflects the high acclaim given worldwide to the achievements related to making blue light-emitting diodes (LEDs) a reality.
I wish to express my profound respect for the achievements of these three eminent researchers.  I also take great pride as a Japanese in the fact that once again, Japan’s high level of academic research and its human resources have been demonstrated to both the people of Japan and people around the world to be Japan’s greatest resources that are world-class in caliber.
Taking the opportunity of the awarding of this Nobel Prize, I will endeavor to make Japan “the most innovation-friendly country in the world” by vigorously advancing the cultivation of human resource capacity that accommodates globalization and other changes and by preparing highly appealing research environments.

Shinzo Abe
Prime Minister of Japan
October 7, 2014