Hideki Yukawa was born in Tokyo, Japan, on 23 January, 1907 was brought up in Kyoto and graduated from the local university in 1929. From 1932 to 1939 he was a lecturer at the Kyoto University and lecturer and Assistant Professor at the Osaka University. While at Osaka University, in 1935, he published a paper entitled "On the Interaction of Elementary Particles. I." in which he proposed a new field theory of nuclear forces and predicted the existence of the meson (the particular meson he predicted is known as a pion. As a physisist he continued to devote himself to the study of mesons. Yukawa joined Yoshio Nishina's laboratory at RIKEN (in Tokyo) in 1940 to work on theoretical physics. During the period 1961 to 1967, he served as a RIKEN Chief Scientist.
In 1932 he married, and he and his wife Sumiko have two sons, Harumi and Takaaki. Sadly, Hideki Yukawa died in 1981.
Recognition for his work has come from many sources. He received the Decoration of Cultural Merit in 1943. Yakawa recieved an honorary doctorate of the University of Paris and honorary membership of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Yukawa recieved his crowning award, the Nobel Prize in Physics, in 1949.