Research on High‐$Tc$ Superconductivity in Japan

“Will a new age of superconductor technology dawn in the near future and make the current semiconductor technology obsolete?” I wondered in the early 1970s. My research until then had been mostly in semiconductors. Like many a semiconductor physicist, I felt that it was becoming difficult to carry on this research at a university laboratory. Most advances in semiconductor research were being made by that time at laboratories supported by the big industrial corporations. These considerations motivated me to move away from semiconductors, and to think of a new direction for my research.