Dr. Yonezawa, can you tell us something about your childhood?
	Well, I was always brimming with curiosity. Once, when I was just four years old, I was so curious about a phonograph my family had, trying to figure out how the sound came out of it, that I turned the crank the wrong way and tried to open it up and ended up breaking it. My mother loved mathematics, and when I was just a kindergartner drawing pictures, she would sketch me diagrams to teach me mathematical concepts, such as the fact that the sum of the interior angles of a triangle is always 180 degrees. I was always bothering the adults around me by asking "Why this?" "How come that?" Even after I started elementary school I was forever asking my teachers questions about things like, "What happens if you jump up in the air while you're on a moving train?"
	Why did you decide to study science?
	When I was in my first year of junior high school, I applied for and got a job at a radio station. I was not very good at speaking in front of an audience, and I thought this would help. I was part of a program in which two children got a chance to play journalist and interview a famous person, and after a while I began to think that it would be fun to be a real journalist. However, I eventually decided my personality was more suited to science because it is objective and not affected by changing value judgments, whereas journalism is subjective and bound up with value judgments that can change over time. When I enrolled in the Kyoto University Faculty of Science, I thought at first that I would like to specialize in mathematics. But I changed my mind and chose physics partly because Dr. Hideki Yukawa, who had won the Nobel Prize in physics, was teaching at the university. I decided the best thing would be if I could use my skill in mathematics to do physics research that might benefit society.