Nobel Prize winning climatologist Syukuro Manabe and iconic former baseball player Shigeo Nagashima were among nine people selected as recipients of Japan's Order of Culture this year, the government said Tuesday.
Others receiving the top cultural award are kabuki actor Onoe Kikugoro VII, 79, molecular biology researcher Tsuneko Okazaki, 88, Japanese tanka poet Hirohiko Okano, 97, anthropologist Junzo Kawada, 87, painter Koji Kinutani, 78, and mathematician Shigefumi Mori, 70. Ballet dancer Asami Maki, who died at the age of 87 last Wednesday, was also named a recipient.
Manabe, 90, shared this year's Nobel Prize in physics with Italian Giorgio Parisi and German Klaus Hasselmann for devising a model for predicting climate change, establishing the theory that an increase in carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere was the cause of global warming.