Despite its long maritime tradition, Japan lags far behind Scandinavia and the United States in terms of recreational yachting.
Only one in some 300 Japanese owns what is classified as a leisure boat, compared with one out of six to seven Scandinavians and one in 16 Americans, according to the Japan Boating Industry Association.
The volume of domestic shipments last year totaled 19.6 billion yen, or less than half the amount posted during the free-spending days of the asset-inflated bubble economy in the late 1980s, the association says.