20 Years of Japanese Winners: Has the Ig Nobel Prize Outgrown Its Reputation as a Silly Award?

Another Year, Another Japanese Winner

The Ig Nobel Prizes have been announced once again.

And once again, a Japanese researcher has won.

That makes 20 consecutive years.

We are well past the point of wondering whether someone from Japan will win this year. A Japanese Ig Nobel laureate is becoming as predictable a feature of autumn as any other seasonal news story.

This year’s prize in medicine went to a scientific study of the proper way to blow your nose.

Yes, the nose.

More specifically, how to blow it.

On the surface, it sounds exactly like the kind of subject the Ig Nobel Prize was made for. But as I read the news, another thought occurred to me:

Has the Ig Nobel Prize changed its place in the world?

It Used to Feel Much More Like a Joke

When I first heard of the Ig Nobel Prize, it struck me as a much more pointed joke award.

It was something that made us laugh and say, “People really do study the strangest things.” Its identity as a parody of the Nobel Prize was far more prominent.

These days, though, it feels a little different.

News reports no longer present the winners as merely examples of bizarre research. Increasingly, the message is that the subject may sound funny, but the research itself is serious.

That is consistent with the prize’s stated purpose: to honor achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think.

This year’s study of nose-blowing is a perfect example. The subject may sound like an elementary school science project, but the researchers actually measured airflow and scientifically examined what happens when people blow their noses.

The subject is the funny part. The research is not.

That distinction is what makes it interesting.

Science Is More Than Research with an Obvious Use

Whenever scientific research comes up, the conversation tends to turn quickly to practical value.

Developing a new drug. Creating a new kind of semiconductor. Solving the energy crisis.

All of those goals are important, of course.

At its root, however, science begins with a much simpler impulse:

“How does this actually work?”

What is the right way to blow your nose?

Someone cared enough about that question to measure it seriously. Where most of us would simply say, “Who cares?” and move on, a researcher said, “No, let’s test it.”

That peculiar persistence is profoundly scientific.

If we decide in advance that researchers should pursue only subjects with clear social value, research agendas will become increasingly uniform. At the outset, no one can know for certain what will prove useful in the future.

People must have laughed at Galileo for dropping two weights from the Leaning Tower of Pisa.

What possible use could that have?

The Mystery of Japan’s 20-Year Streak

Still, 20 consecutive years of Japanese winners is remarkable.

A Japanese Nobel laureate becomes national news. With the Ig Nobels, meanwhile, someone from Japan seems to win every year.

Perhaps Japan is home to an unusually large number of people willing to investigate, with complete seriousness, questions that make everyone else wonder why anyone would bother.

The Ig Nobel Prize, too, has quietly become more than an award for laughing at strange research. It has become another kind of science prize—one that celebrates people who have an unusual question and cannot resist investigating it properly.

If the Nobel Prize honors humanity’s great discoveries, the Ig Nobel Prize honors people who seriously pursue humanity’s seemingly trivial questions.

I am rather fond of the latter as well.

After all, this year’s subject was how to blow your nose.

While humanity investigates the origins of the universe, it also investigates the most efficient way to clear a runny nose.

Science covers a much wider territory than we tend to imagine.