Fuji sailboats: a Yokosuka yard built on a rival's leftover molds
Fuji Yacht Builders was established around 1971 in Yokosuka, Japan, by Mr. Makise, formerly of TOA Yachts, and Mr. Nakazaki, the former head carpenter of Far East Yachts -- and it started up on the very ground where Far East had built its Mariner line. By 1972, half of the now-defunct Far East's staff was working at Fuji. Over the following decade the yard built full-keel cruising ketches to John G. Alden's designs before closing out its run with a single, very different Sparkman & Stephens sloop.
Origins and ownership
Far East Yachts, founded by Clair Oberly in Yokosuka in 1957 (the same history that records that date elsewhere puts it at 1958), had built the Mariner line before it folded. When Fuji Yacht Builders started up on that same site, the continuity ran deeper than location: Mr. Kato sold the Mariner 32's hull mold to Nakazaki and Makise, and Fuji paired that inherited hull with a new Alden-designed deck and coachroof to create the Fuji 32. Some of the yard's earliest one-off boats likely used a second leftover mold, from the Mariner 36. Oberly's name, which surfaces in some designer records tied to Fuji, traces to that mold inheritance -- he founded Far East, not Fuji, and had no hand in drawing a Fuji boat.
The designers
By 1973, working from entirely new Alden designs, Fuji delivered the first Fuji 35 and began building the Fuji 45 -- both credited to John G. Alden, though Alden himself never saw either boat built: he died in 1962, eleven years before the first Fuji 35 was completed. By then the Alden firm was overseen by Niels Helleberg, who went on to become its chief designer. The Fuji 45 is catalogued in the Alden archive as Design No. 1030, drawn in 1974; the Fuji 35's clipper-bowed ketch, offered with an optional cutter rig, carried Alden's fondness for Grand Banks-style fishing schooners into its lines. Alden's original design records are held today at MIT's Hart Nautical Collection.
Fuji turned to a different firm for its last model. Late in the decade the company approached Sparkman & Stephens for what it asked to be "a roomy, comfortable cruising yacht"; S&S's Francis Kinney drafted Design No. 2292, which became the Fuji 40 -- a modern-underbody sloop, a sharp break from the full-keel Alden ketches that made up the rest of the line.
Construction through the eras
The Fuji 32's hull came from the same mold as the Mariner 32's, fitted out with the new Alden-designed deck. The Fuji 35, built at the Yokosuka yard, had a hand laid-up fiberglass hull with polyurethane insulation. The Fuji 45's construction is recorded in the Alden archive simply as fiberglass. Across the range hulls were solid fiberglass with aluminum spars, even as the Alden boats' silhouettes echoed an already-eclipsed wooden-boat era. The Fuji 40 arrived under different pressure: the company started building its first seven hulls in late 1977 before the design plans were even finished.
Lines and generations
Fuji's output splits into two distinct lines. The full-keel Alden ketches -- the 32, 35, and 45 -- carried the yard from its 1973 debut through more than 200 boats before sales began to wane in the mid-1970s; the 35 alone ran nine years, 1973 to 1982, with 128 built. In all, Fuji Yacht Builders turned out roughly 230 boats for the U.S. market in the decade beginning 1973, ranging from 32 to 45 feet. The S&S-designed Fuji 40 sloop came last and stayed smallest, at just over a dozen built, the last in 1979. By the end of that year the company's Newport Beach, California importer had stopped ordering, and Niels Helleberg recalled that whatever the boats had sold for, it wasn't enough to keep the company in business -- Fuji Yacht Builders closed within two years of the 40's debut.
Who Fuji is for
A Fuji suits buyers drawn to a heavy, full-keel cruising ketch out of John G. Alden's design house, working in a Grand Banks fishing-schooner idiom, built by a Japanese yard whose own molds and early staff traced back to a predecessor builder on the same ground. Buyers after a faster, more modern platform under the same builder's name have one option: the S&S-designed Fuji 40, though only about a dozen exist. Fuji shared its Yokosuka export era with contemporaries Mariner and Yamaha, part of a Japanese boatbuilding trade that supplied the U.S. market for more than 25 years.
