Hello and welcome to the history of Japan podcast, episode 482, Japan,

Japan, the beautiful, The Ambiguous, Part 1.

I think it's fair to say that basically no other institution on Earth has quite the currency

or cachet as the Nobel Prize. The name comes from Alfred Noble, a Swedish chemist born in

1833. A very talented chemist, he invented many of the key chemical processes behind things like

cordite, a type of smokeless explosive.

He's most famous, of course, as the inventor of dynamite.

And all that served to make him ludicrously rich, naturally enough, because war, of course, is a business

that is always booming.

Supposedly, the story goes, in 1888, Alfred Noble woke up to a bit of a shock.

His obituary was in the newspaper, and what it had to say was not good.

Specifically, the article labeled him as a merchant of death whose main contribution to humanity

had been in the field of new and innovative ways to kill each other.

Apparently, the whole thing was a mix-up.

His brother, Ludwig Noble, who was also active in the family business, was the one who actually

had died, and said paper had mistaken the two.

Though it was based on a mix-up, the experience deeply shook Alfred Noble, who personally

was a quiet and sensitive guy.

He apparently liked to write poetry in his spare time, and had, he claimed, invented

dynamite as a mining and construction tool and was upset by its deployment

in warfare. The upshot of the whole experience was that Noble, now very worried about how he'd be

remembered after his death, rewrote his own will. And when he finally did die in 1896 of a cerebral

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