Yacht Sellers Find Good Sailing in Japan : Exports: The Japanese, with money and more leisure time, have a budding love affair with boating and have become a growing market for American-built luxury boats.

Toshi Ohashi’s second-floor office affords a superb view of the luxury yachts that dot the blue water of the Harbor Club Tower and Marina on Lido Island, but he seems nearly oblivious to the serene setting outside.

When he’s not on the phone, the 39-year-old manager of Newport West Yacht Sales is busy meeting with Japanese clients and dashing off letters to clients across the Pacific. His company, a subsidiary of Toshin Keikaku, a Tokyo-based services company, is a conduit between Japanese leisure boat buyers and U.S. sellers.

For an island nation, the Japanese have never shown much enthusiasm for boating as a recreational pursuit. But now the Japanese--looking for ways to spend their growing leisure time--are beginning a budding love affair with boating. And for a host of wealthy Japanese industrialists, financiers and real estate magnates, boating means big, sleek, expensive yachts.

Japanese buyers are becoming increasingly important to U.S. boat builders, said Charlie Barthold, executive editor of Yachting magazine in New York. Yacht purchases by American buyers have been slumping for several years, he said, and the Japanese have taken up some of the slack.

Boat brokers and builders say that orders from Japan have increased substantially this year. One major reason for this demand is a change in Japan’s tax law last year, which has drastically cut tariffs on imports of foreign-made yachts to Japan. Buyers of boats that exceed 28 feet in length are now taxed at a rate of 5.5% of the boat’s value, down from 32% previously. The change would slash the tax on the purchase price of a $300,000 yacht to only $16,500, down from $96,000 previously.

But the tariff change is only one reason for Japan’s boating boom.

As part of an effort to boost consumer spending on recreational pursuits, the Japanese government has been constructing new marinas all over Japan to alleviate a severe shortage of marina space and encourage pleasure boating among Japanese citizens.

“The government took the lead in asking the Japanese to engage in recreational sports, and boating was one of them,” said Herbert Pocklington, president of Hatteras International in High Point, N.C., the international sales arm of Hatteras Yachts Inc. He said his company’s sales to Japanese buyers have doubled this year.

Two of Japan’s largest boat builders--Yamaha and Nissan--have helped fund construction of marinas, Pocklington said. “This is totally unheard of,” he said. “It’s like Boeing putting money into the construction of airports.”

In the past year or so, a growing number of fishermen have gone into the sportfishing business as a new source of income, Ohashi said. And the Japanese government, land developers and the fishing industry have banded together to build more marinas to ease a severe shortage of mooring space for yachts.

“When the marinas are done, we expect sales of our boats to increase by three or four times in the next five to 10 years,” said Charles Carricarte, international sales manager of Bertram Yachts & Co., a boat maker in Miami.

Another major factor in the yacht-buying binge is the change in Japanese attitudes toward recreation and leisure time. Today’s younger Japanese workers have more spare time than their parents, typically working a five- or 5 1/2-day workweek compared to the six-day week their parents were accustomed to.

Newport West’s Ohashi said the Japanese are fishermen at heart, but postwar industrialization briefly interrupted this natural affinity for the sea. In addition, the yen’s strength against the dollar and the relaxation of import duties encouraged many affluent Japanese to buy products that would reflect their new economic power.

And what more recognizable sign of wealth and power is there than a yacht?

Yacht brokers say the Japanese are buying bigger and fancier yachts, some costing several million dollars or more. Brokers say the two most popular yacht makers with Japanese buyers are Bertram and Hatteras, two top-of-the-line U.S. yacht makers.

“Last year, we sold about six yachts for about $2.5 million (total) to the Japanese,” said John Gerber, a yacht broker at Hatteras of California in Newport Beach. “This year, we’ve sold three yachts in excess of $2 million already. That does not include an order we just received for a 45-foot luxury yacht for $475,000.”

Reese Williams of Crow’s Nest, a Bertram broker in San Diego, said the Japanese snapped up 50% of the new boats the company sold last year on the West Coast.

In recent months, Japanese boat buyers are steering away from the East Coast and heading for West Coast brokers to reduce the cost of transporting the yachts to Japan, brokers said.