American Yoichiro Nambu of the University of Chicago won half of the prize for the discovery of spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic physics. Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa of Japan shared the other half of the prize for discovering the origin of the broken symmetry that predicts the existence of at least three families of quarks in nature. Visit this link to read more: 2 Japanese and an American win 2008 Physics Nobel