Sowa Trading Co., Inc. was founded in October 1984 by a group of engineers as a merger partner of Japan in order to distribute the scientific instrumentation in Japanese market. Sowa invested in Packard Japan KK a subsidiary of Packard Bioscience Company (the United States), which is the world’s largest radiation analysis manufacturer.
Since then, for over 30 years, Sowa has been introducing a lot of the latest laboratory instruments and reagents from Western countries to Japanese researchers of life sciences and environmental sciences.

As you may know, after the World War II, it goes without saying that sciences, which have been leading the world’s market, are electronics and life sciences. Especially, life sciences have shown outstanding advance and process. There is no end to the development of life sciences, as you can see from lots of big discoveries such as finding iPS cell and breakthrough of DNA/RNA, which is the rise of life. These discoveries have overcome diseases and brought the longevity society.

However, sciences of this field must be pursuing to atoms and molecules level and developing much further. Sowa has contributed slightly to the above development, but we have been working on it in a body.
Furthermore, the followings are Sowa’s history of contribution for progress.

That is to say, Sowa has been importing the followings. Reagents and synthesizers for DNA/RNA from the United Kingdom and the United States, peptides (especially multi-peptide and combinatorial chemistry), protein synthesizers from the United States, glycoprotein analysis synthesizers from the United Kingdom, and DNA fragment analyzers from the United Kingdom. Sowa has imported and delivered to a lot of universities and pharmaceutical companies at the earliest stages of investigations in Japan. These have influenced their research to make a progress at an accelerated rate.
Recently, Sowa has been importing instruments such as; molecular imaging system, which measures the functions and configurations inside the body of lab animals like mouse and rats from outside of its body non-invasively (in vivo), from the United States and France. It has been installed to many facilities including National Cancer Center, National Cerebral and Cardiovascular Center, and Hokkaido University.

Currently, Japan faces an urgent need to approach to the energy issues. This traces back to the nuclear power station. It is imperative to do analysis accurately of the environment to perceive the radioactivity, which is leaked from the reactor due to the Great East Japan Earthquake.
To deal with such situation, Sowa has worked in cooperation with the Center for Applied Isotope Studies at the University of Georgia and imported the instrument, which adjusts automatically the samples of radioactivity absorbed into rice, trees, and the environment due to the radiation leak. It has been installed into the radioactivity-monitoring center among many parts of Japan. In addition, after Great East Japan Earthquake (March 2011), Sowa has speedily corresponded to sending the instruments, which measure internal and external exposure of radiation, to many citizens and autonomies including Fukushima Prefecture in cooperation with Consumer Affairs Agency, Ministry of Agriculture, and Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology.

As described, Sowa will continuously import the most advanced instruments in the world, which is necessary to the research of not only environmental sciences but also life sciences, and make further contribution to Japan’s research development and science technology to proceed.

We appreciate our customers' loyalty and our suppliers' ongoing cooperation and assistance, and look forward to continuous growth and progress in the research enterprise.