One of this year's three Nobel Prize winners for chemistry, Hideki Shirakawa, left for Stockholm on Monday to attend the ceremony in which he will receive his prize.
Shirakawa, 64, professor emeritus of the University of Tsukuba, left Narita airport with his wife, Chiyoko, 61, to attend the ceremony scheduled for Sunday.
He won the prize together with physicist Alan Heeger and chemist Alan MacDiarmid -- both of the United States -- for their discovery and subsequent development of conductive polymers.
Shirakawa is expected to give a lecture at Stockholm University before returning home Dec. 16.
Shirakawa is the ninth Japanese to receive a Nobel Prize, the last being novelist Kenzaburo Oe, who won the literature award in 1994.