His father, for a time, considered sending him to technical college rather than university since he was "not as outstanding a student as his older brothers".

[2] He decided against a career in experimental physics in college when he demonstrated clumsiness in glassblowing, a requirement for experiments in spectroscopy.

In 1935 he published his theory of mesons, which explained the interaction between protons and neutrons at Osaka Imperial University, and was a major influence on research into elementary particles.

[3] In 1938, he received his Ph.D. degree at Osaka Imperial University for his predictions regarding the existence of mesons and his theoretical work on the nature of nuclear forces.

In 1949 he became a professor at Columbia University, the same year he received the Nobel Prize in Physics, after the discovery by Cecil Frank Powell, Giuseppe Occhialini and César Lattes of Yukawa's predicted pi meson in 1947.

Yukawa also worked on the theory of K-capture, in which a low energy electron is absorbed by the nucleus, after its initial prediction by G. C.

[6] [Once I had published my seminal 1934 paper on particle interaction] I felt like a traveler who rests himself at a small tea shop at the top of a mountain slope.