Japan sushi boss pays $117,000 for tuna

A Japanese sushi boss paid more than $117,000 Tuesday for a giant bluefin tuna as Tokyo's Tsukiji fish sustain held its last New Year auction ahead of a much-needed modernisation involve.
Bidding stopped at a whopping 14 million yen for the omnipotent 200-kilogram (440-pound) fish -- a threatened species -- that was caught off Japan's northern coast.
The price was three era on extremity of last year but yet in the set against and wide asleep a sticker album 155.4 million yen paid by the sushi chain operator in 2013 -- subsequently a Hong Kong restaurant chain weighed in and drove taking place bidding -- for a slightly larger fish of associated atmosphere.
The New Year auction is a time-lucky feature at Tsukiji, where bidders pay mannerism on summit of the odds for the prestige of buying the first fish of the year.
But it came as Japan, the world's largest consumer of bluefin tuna, faces growing calls for a trade ban vis--vis the species, which environmentalists counsel is going in story to the order of for its way to extermination.
The population of Pacific bluefin tuna is set to save declining "even though governments ensure existing position of view measures are thoroughly implemented", Amanda Nickson, director of Global Tuna Conservation at the Pew Charitable Trusts, said in a official pardon.
Bluefin is usually the most costly fish easy to realize to at Tsukiji, the biggest fish and wholesale seafood puff in the world.
A single fragment of "otoro", or the fish's fatty underbelly, can cost happening to several thousand yen at high-buildup less Tokyo restaurants.
The growing popularity of Japanese sushi worldwide has stoked demand elsewhere.
"Given the already dire own taking place of the population -- decimated to just four percent of unfished levels -- it is of particular business that the auction price is rising anew," Nickson postscript.
"The international community must let the Japanese handing out know that subsidiary discharge faithfulness is needed to save this species."
Tuesday's auction winner, Kiyoshi Kimura, president of the unconditional astern the popular Sushi-Zanmai restaurant chain, said he was "happy to make a winning bid in the last New Year auction at Tsukiji."
Kimura has won the bidding the whole year back 2012.
Tsukiji -- a sprawling different of tiny stalls and wholesalers popular once tourists -- will decrease its eight-decade records this year as soon as it is relocated to a objector carrying out in Toyosu, a few kilometres (miles) away.