Primary source · Yamaha · 1990–2027
Marine Jet, Yamaha's name for the same ski
In Japan these are not WaveRunners. They are Marine Jets, sold under codes rather than names, and the gap between the two vocabularies means owners of the same hull cannot find each other's parts.
Not yet reviewed. Every figure below was read from the source named against its section, and nobody has checked this article back against those sources a second time.
For thirty-five years the home market had no WaveRunner, and then it did
Yamaha's Japanese domestic brand for these machines was Marine Jet, written in katakana, from 1986 until the 2022 model year, when Yamaha standardised the home-market name to WaveRunner to match the rest of the world. Everything built before that carries the older vocabulary, which is what matters when you are buying a used hull. Home-market machines also carry a code rather than a name: MJ, then the displacement, then two letters for the model family. So the machine an American rider calls a WaveBlaster is an MJ-700TZ in Japan, and the two words describe one hull. That was a vocabulary split rather than a product split, and it ran through the entire range until the naming was unified.
From: Yamaha Motor Japan, Marine Jet history, Yamaha Motor, The History of Our Marine Business, Marine Jet
The two WaveBlaster generations are the TZ and the RZ
The clearest case is the WaveBlaster, because Yamaha's own engineering literature confirms it. Yamaha Technical Review number 22 is titled for the MJ-760RZ Wave Blaster II, which fixes that mapping from the manufacturer's side rather than from a forum. The first generation is the MJ-700TZ. In the Japanese scene the machines are discussed as TZ and RZ rather than as WaveBlaster 1 and 2, which is an idiom no American shop would recognise and no American search would match.
From: Yamaha Technical Review No.22, September 1996, MJ-760RZ Wave Blaster II, Yamaha Motor Japan, Marine Jet history
Why a naming table is worth more than it looks
A Japanese owner searching for 700TZ parts and an American owner searching for WaveBlaster parts are shopping for the same components and will never see each other's listings. The Japanese vintage scene is organised and active, and its used-parts market runs largely through domestic auctions that English-language search does not reach. Publishing the mapping is cheap, nobody owns it, and it is the one piece of reference material that is useful in both directions at once.
The badge came back in 2026, after nearly thirty years
Yamaha unveiled a new WaveBlaster on 24 August 2026 as a 2027 model, reviving a name dormant since the late 1990s. It is a stand-up rather than the sit-down the badge originally carried, running the 1,049cc TR-1 High Output three-cylinder four-stroke at 110 horsepower through a 144mm pump, in a VARTM composite hull with no sponsons so the machine rolls inward and the rider's weight turns it. Ninety-nine inches long, 425 pounds dry, and 11,999 US dollars from the first quarter of 2027. Against the original TZ at roughly 149kg, the new machine is some 44kg heavier.
From: Yamaha Motor Canada, 2027 WaveBlaster model page (2027-WB1050A), Yamaha WaveRunners, WaveBlaster Sport Series page
One MJ-700TZ crossed the Pacific on its own
Yamaha's Communication Plaza displays a WaveBlaster with an unusual history, and it happens to settle the naming question from the manufacturer's own side. The machine was swept from the town of Okuma in Fukushima Prefecture on 11 March 2011 during the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami. It drifted roughly 5,000 kilometres across the Pacific and came ashore on Johnston Atoll, where a United States Fish and Wildlife Service survey ship found it in May 2014. It was taken to Honolulu, returned to Japan with help from the Japan Environmental Action Network and the training vessel Fukushima Maru, restored to working order, and handed back to its owner at Lake Hamana in Shizuoka on 20 December 2015. Yamaha gives the machine's Japanese name as MJ-700TZ throughout.
From: Yamaha Motor Communication Plaza, The Bonds of Goodwill Project
Europe is thin in the record, and that is worth saying
Across twenty-one readable issues of Yamaha's dealer magazine, continental Europe produces almost nothing on personal watercraft that is not already told elsewhere on this site. Turkey appears with XL700s at Bodrum and the Czech Republic appears as a line about riding courses at Brno, both in contents listings rather than articles. There is no European dealer profile, no European model launch and no European race report in the set. A history that padded that out would be inventing a story the sources do not carry.
Caveat
The naming cross-reference is only as good as the mapping behind it, and only four mappings are confirmed on both sides. The rest of that table is inference from a naming pattern, and inference is how a plausible parts list ends up describing the wrong hull. Where a code is not stated here, it is because it is not yet known rather than because it does not exist.
Every issue cited here
| Issue | Headline |
|---|---|
| 2005 No.5 | Yamaha began R&D in 1983 that led to our first Water Vehicle |
| 2007 No.5 | Power with Intelligence points the way to the PWC of the future |
Other sources cited here
- Yamaha Motor Japan, Marine Jet history
- Yamaha Motor, The History of Our Marine Business, Marine Jet
- Yamaha Technical Review No.22, September 1996, MJ-760RZ Wave Blaster II
- Yamaha Motor Canada, 2027 WaveBlaster model page (2027-WB1050A)
- Yamaha WaveRunners, WaveBlaster Sport Series page
- Yamaha Motor Communication Plaza, The Bonds of Goodwill Project
Full index of the magazine at Yamaha News PWC index, where the scope of what has actually been read is stated: most issues have had their index read and not their body text. Yamaha permits personal use only and prohibits redistribution, so nothing here is rehosted or excerpted. Every citation links to Yamaha's own PDF.
Yamaha · 1990–2027 · 2 issues cited