There are significant runs of chum, coho, steelhead and "masu" along many of the northern asian countries...although china doesn't have any recorded salmon returns at least none that have persisted into modern times, north and south Korea, Japan and russia all do...Russia has the highest diversity of species of all these regions with as many as seven species returning to some rivers, but even japan and the Korea's have distributions of 3 or 4 species on average...it is my understanding, and I could be wrong but I don't think so, that in Japan, it is ILLEGAL to sport fish for mature salmon in rivers, and all of their fisheries based economies are hatchery driven...the only salmon you are allowed to fish for in japan are juvenile masu...so yes aurora has a real good point indeed...those rivers likely weren't always like that.