Bull. Jpn. Soc. Fish. Oceanogr. 77(4), Page 241-251, 2013   Evaluation of recovery and reconstruction of fisheries from the Great East Japan Earthquake on March 11, 2011 based on the statistical data in Iwate Prefecture, the Pacific coast of northeast Japan Tomoaki Goto1† 1 Iwate Fisheries Technology Center, 3-75-3 Heita, Kamaishi, Iwate 026-0001, Japan † E-mail: t-gotou@pref.iwate.jp Recovery and reconstruction of fisheries from the Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami disaster on March 11, 2011 was evaluated based on the registration records of fishing boats, and the annual data of catch, number of landing boats and CPUE in 2011 and 2012 to compare the data of pre-disaster from 2008 to 2010 in Iwate Prefecture, the Pacific coast of northeast Japan. The registered number of fishing boats greatly decreased after the earthquake mainly in the small-scale boat class less than 15 GT, and the recovery rate of the boats canceled due to tsunami was relatively low in the class greater than 5 GT among them. Catch of abalone, Haliotis discus hannai, and sea urchin, Strongylocentrotus spp., decreased extremely after the earthquake in 2011, and the extremely low value (less than 50% of the pre-disaster value), caused by direct impact of tsunami on the stock, continued in 2012 for the latter. The number of landing boats in fish markets of Iwate was available for the evaluation of the recovery and reconstruction from the earthquake and the states of recovery were varied among seven types of offshore fisheries, i.e., bottom trawl, set-net, bottom gillnet, pot, squid jigging, stick-held dip net for Pacific saury and boat seine for Pacific krill. In the small-scale offshore fisheries as bottom gillnet and pot, the number of landing boats decreased extremely after the earthquake in 2011 and the low value continued without conspicuous increase of the number of landing boats in 2012. Regional differences were also appeared in the state of recovery and reconstruction in the heavily damaged fisheries types. It will be possibly caused by multiple factors of the regional differences in the damage level by the disaster and the reconstruction rate of the infrastructure of the fisheries. Key words: catch, CPUE, fisheries, Iwate, number of fishing boat, tsunami