Innovative Ideas ‘Get Bashed,’ Says Kitagawa; Nobel Laureate Once Faced Intense Criticism for Work That Eventually Earned Him the Prize

The Yomiuri Shimbun

13:56 JST, October 9, 2025

A watershed moment in Susumu Kitagawa’s research, which recently culminated in the Kyoto University professor winning the 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, came in 1979, when he was appointed as an assistant at what is now known as Kindai University, then called Kinki University.

Kitagawa had completed his studies at Kyoto University’s graduate school. As a student, he had continually researched the use of calculations to explain the properties of chemical substances and reactions between them. However, at his new research laboratory, he was assigned a research topic in a completely different field — synthesizing compounds from metal ions and organic molecules.

The lab’s equipment at the time was inadequate for this research. Kitagawa turned to the Faculty of Medicine, which possessed state-of-the-art equipment, and was given permission to use these facilities at night. Kitagawa at times worked through the night on his experiments.

Kitagawa was swamped with his duties as an assistant, but in hopes of pushing his research forward, he identified students’ areas of expertise and learned how to entrust some of the work to them.

“Your research will never make progress if you don’t make good use of the whole organization around you,” Kitagawa said. “I wouldn’t have figured that out without my experience at Kinki University.”

After a lot of hard work, Kitagawa synthesized a compound that had many cavities. Kitagawa noticed that these cavities could be used to absorb and release gases, and he announced his findings in a paper published in 1997. However, Kitagawa initially came in for stinging criticism at international conferences and other forums. “It’s unbelievable that gas would enter these cavities,” one critic thundered, while others told Kitagawa he was “mistaken.”

“The more innovative your idea is, the more you get bashed,” Kitagawa said. “But if you give up then, that’s the end. I thought, ‘Damn it!’ and I tried again. I made efforts for improvement day by day.”

Kitagawa’s favorite saying, which comes from a Chinese history work called “Book of the Later Han,” states that it is only when a fierce wind blows that one can tell which grasses are strong enough to keep standing. It took considerable time for the accuracy of Kitagawa’s research to be widely recognized. The dogged strength found in weeds mirrors that which Kitagawa displayed during his research career.

“A person’s strength also becomes evident when they encounter difficulties,” Kitagawa said.