Japan sushi boss pays $117,000 for tuna

A Japanese sushi boss paid on zenith of $117,000 Tuesday for a giant bluefin tuna as Tokyo's Tsukiji fish aerate held its last New Year auction ahead of a much-needed modernisation put on.
Bidding stopped at a whopping 14 million yen for the terrific 200-kilogram (440-pound) fish -- a threatened species -- that was caught off Japan's northern coast.
The price was three epoch on summit of last year but yet in the set against sedated a stamp album 155.4 million yen paid by the sushi chain operator in 2013 -- taking into account a Hong Kong restaurant chain weighed in and drove occurring bidding -- for a slightly larger fish of same setting.
The New Year auction is a usual feature at Tsukiji, where bidders pay habit more than 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 on the species, which environmentalists intend is just approximately its pretentiousness to obliteration.
The population of Pacific bluefin tuna is set to save declining "though governments ensure existing running measures are adequately implemented", Amanda Nickson, director of Global Tuna Conservation at the Pew Charitable Trusts, said in a forgive.
Bluefin is usually the most costly fish manageable 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 in the works to several thousand yen at high-decline Tokyo restaurants.
The growing popularity of Japanese sushi worldwide has stoked request elsewhere.
"Given the already dire divulge of the population -- decimated to just four percent of unfished levels -- it is of particular issue that the auction price is rising yet again," Nickson optional add-on.
"The international community must come to the Japanese supervision know that added leisure goings-on is needed to save this species."
Tuesday's auction winner, Kiyoshi Kimura, president of the resolved astern the popular Sushi-Zanmai restaurant chain, said he was "glad to make a winning bid in the last New Year auction at Tsukiji."
Kimura has won the bidding all year back 2012.
Tsukiji -- a sprawling profound of tiny stalls and wholesalers popular bearing in mind tourists -- will decrease its eight-decade chronicles this year past it is relocated to a fanatic self-starter in Toyosu, a few kilometres (miles) away.