Chris Loew

Chris Loew

Contributing Editor reporting from Osaka, Japan

Chris Loew reports from Osaka, Japan as a contributing editor for SeafoodSource.com. In addition to writing for SeafoodSource.com, he covers Japan for stock-investing newsletter Global Investing. He co-authored a college language text, “Healthcare English:  Read, Write and Speak It.” When not writing, he proofreads Japanese-to-English translations. Chris is a 1990 graduate of The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. After graduation, he worked for two years in the purchasing department of a Japanese meat importer, and for five years as export director for two Seattle food companies, selling to customers in the Far East, and arranging shipping and export documentation for mixed containers of frozen foods.


Author Archive

Published on
July 6, 2021

A project of the National Marine Mammal Foundation (NMMF) in the United States, in collaboration with the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment, aims to measure the frequency range that minke whales can hear.

The research would fill in an information gap and help lessen human disturbance to a wide range of baleen whales. But it involves capturing and temporarily restraining wild whales, a tricky procedure that some animal rights groups say

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Published on
June 28, 2021

The return of glass eels to Japan improved this year, but a subcommittee of the Fisheries Policy Council meeting held in Tokyo approved maintaining the current cap on the number that can be stocked to aquaculture ponds in line with a regional resource management agreement.

The amount of elvers of the Japanese eel, anguilla japonica, collected in Japan had been in decline since the latter half of the 1950s, corresponding with channelization of

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Published on
June 28, 2021

Japan’s Fisheries Agency has released its annual Fisheries White Paper explaining trends and reviewing the policies of 2020, and setting forth new policies for 2021.

The situation of the marine products market in Japan and overseas was reviewed. Worldwide, the per-capita consumption of seafood has doubled in the last 50 years, and aquaculture production and marine products trade is rising, but domestically, consumption of seafood continues

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Published on
June 11, 2021

Image recognition technology using artificial intelligence (AI) to discern target and non-target shapes is finding uses in aquaculture and fish processing.

Two such recent applications are the Automated Fish-Counting System developed by Osaka, Japan-based Yanmar Marine Systems Co., Ltd. (YMS) and ImageAnalyzer Ceres-II by Tokyo-based CDEX.

YMS is a member of the Yanmar Group, known for its diesel engines and for applications of the engines in

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Published on
June 4, 2021

Tokyo, Japan-based Seafood Legacy Co., Ltd. announced that on 1 June, its fishery and science departments, which provided consulting to fishery or aquaculture producers, would become independent as UMITO Partners Inc.'s Shunji Murakami – formerly vice president and COO of Seafood Legacy – left those positions on 31 May to become CEO and president of the new Tokyo-based company.

The move represents an unraveling of the February 2019

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Published on
June 3, 2021

Japan’s Fisheries Agency released a report on 28 May showing that seafood production in 2020, including that from aquaculture, declined by 21,000 metric tons (MT), or 0.5 percent, from the previous year to 4.175 million MT ... 

Photo courtesy of Andrey

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Published on
June 2, 2021

Two new land-based trout aquaculture projects underway in Japan are partnerships between an infrastructure company, a seafood distributor, and a trout hatchery …

Photo courtesy of Kyushu Electric Power

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Published on
May 28, 2021

As the size of the Japanese fish-paste product market is limited by the country’s shrinking population, the major manufacturers of such products are looking overseas for growth …

Photo courtesy of

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Published on
May 26, 2021

Large hauls of horse mackerel in Japan's Nagasaki Prefecture in May, combined with low restaurant demand, have led to lower wholesale prices at Tokyo’s Toyosu Market …

Photo courtesy of

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Published on
May 25, 2021

Tokyo, Japan-based seafood conglomerate Nissui released its consolidated financial results for fiscal year 2020 on 13 May, and its related presentation materials on 21 May, indicating the company saw a decline in sales and profit.

The company reported its net sales declined by 4.9 percent, and its operating profit dropped 20.8 percent. Ordinary profit was off by 11.8 percent, and profit attributable to the owners of the parent were fairly stable

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