Model Reference

Yamaha · 1986–2027 · cited section by section

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.

What this does not cover.

Every issue before 2003 No.2 is a page image whose only text layer is Yamaha's own index; the eight closest to the FX140 launch are 2000 No.2, 2001 No.3, 2001 No.5, 2002 No.2 through No.5 and 2003 No.1. Forty-five of the seventy-six indexed issues were obtained when the index was built; no copy is kept on this site, and every issue read for this article was streamed from Yamaha's own site on the day it was read.
Europe is barely present in the readable issues. What exists is a German market share figure and a Spanish race series, both already covered in the 2003 to 2009 article, plus two short Turkish items and one Czech item in 2005 No.5. Beyond the German distributor profile, no European dealer profile, model launch or race report was found to build a section on.
Only the eight Japanese domestic market (JDM) to export pairings listed in the naming section are confirmed by Yamaha's own pages. The wider cross-reference has further rows reasoned from the naming pattern, and none of those are stated here as fact.
The MJ-700TZ dimensions in circulation come from Japanese media citing Yamaha rather than from Yamaha directly, and no Yamaha Japan document has been read first-hand for this article.
The English version of Yamaha's marine business history, cited in the first section, no longer answers at its address: on 2026-10-02 it redirected to a page on Yamaha's global site that does not exist. The Japanese page at yamaha-motor.co.jp carries the same text and is the copy the first section rests on.

Every figure below was read from the source named against its section.

For thirty-six 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. The code opens with MJ and the displacement and then carries one or more letters: a single letter on the first two machines, the MJ-500T and MJ-500S, two letters on most of the 1990s range, such as the MJ-650TL and MJ-700TZ, and on at least one machine a further hyphenated suffix, the MJ-700VN-R that Yamaha's dealer magazine indexes in 1998 and 2000. Later codes put MJ in front of the export name itself, as in the MJ-SUV1200 and MJ-FX140. 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 News 1998 No.4, Yamaha News 2000 No.3 , Yamaha Motor Japan, Marine Jet history, Yamaha Motor, History of WaveRunners

Model pages: Yamaha WaveRunner (WR500) · Yamaha WaveBlaster · Yamaha FX140

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.

From: Yamaha Technical Review No.22, MJ-760RZ Wave Blaster II, Yamaha Motor Japan, Marine Jet history

Model pages: Yamaha WaveBlaster · Yamaha WaveBlaster II

The naming table, as far as Yamaha's own pages take it

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. 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. Eight pairings are Yamaha's own. Its global WaveRunner history prints seven, each export name with its home-market code in brackets, written out as Marine Jet 500T rather than MJ-500T: the 1986 WaveRunner 500 is the MJ-500T, the 1987 WaveJammer 500 the MJ-500S, the 1990 WaveRunner III 650 the MJ-650TL, the 1992 WaveRunner VXR650 the MJ-650TX, the 1993 WaveBlaster 700 the MJ-700TZ, the 1994 WaveRaider 700 the MJ-700RA and the 1995 WaveVenture 700 the MJ-700VN. The eighth, the 1996 WaveBlaster II as the MJ-760RZ, comes from the Technical Review paper named in the section above. Every other pairing in circulation is reasoned from the pattern of the codes, and none is stated here.

From: Yamaha Motor, History of WaveRunners, Yamaha Technical Review No.22, MJ-760RZ Wave Blaster II, Yamaha Motor Japan, Marine Jet history

Model pages: Yamaha WaveRunner (WR500) · Yamaha WaveRunner III · Yamaha WaveRunner VXR650 · Yamaha WaveBlaster · Yamaha WaveRaider 700 · Yamaha WaveVenture 700 · Yamaha WaveBlaster II

MJ Marine Jet, the home-market brand
700 the displacement
TZ one or more letters, not explained in the sources here

1986 WaveRunner 500 is MJ-500T
1987 WaveJammer 500 is MJ-500S
1990 WaveRunner III 650 is MJ-650TL
1992 WaveRunner VXR650 is MJ-650TX
1993 WaveBlaster 700 is MJ-700TZ
1994 WaveRaider 700 is MJ-700RA
1995 WaveVenture 700 is MJ-700VN
1996 WaveBlaster II is MJ-760RZ

A home-market code read in three parts, then the eight pairs Yamaha's own pages print, the export name on the left and its code on the right.

How we know: Yamaha Motor's History of WaveRunners for seven pairs and Yamaha Technical Review No.22 for the eighth, both cited in this chapter.

The badge came back in 2026, after nearly thirty years

Yamaha unveiled a new WaveBlaster as a 2027 model, reviving a name dormant since the late 1990s. It is a sit-down, as the original was, and the smallest sit-down Yamaha has built in decades, running the 1,049cc TR-1 High Output three-cylinder four-stroke through a 144mm pump, in a composite hull built by a resin-transfer moulding process Yamaha names VARTM, and with no sponsons, the fins fitted to a hull's rear edges to steady it in a turn, so the machine rolls inward and the rider's weight turns it. Ninety-nine inches long, 425 pounds dry, and 11,999 US dollars. 425 pounds is about 193 kilograms, against roughly 149 for the original TZ, a figure that comes from Japanese media rather than Yamaha.

From: Yamaha Motor Canada, 2027 WaveBlaster model page (2027-WB1050A), Yamaha WaveRunners, WaveBlaster Sport Series page

Model pages: Yamaha WaveBlaster

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 the United States Fish and Wildlife Service found it in May 2014 and carried it to Honolulu. It was 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

Model pages: Yamaha WaveBlaster

Europe is thin in the record, and that is worth saying

Across twenty-five issues of Yamaha's dealer magazine read in full, continental Europe produces almost nothing on personal watercraft that is not already told elsewhere on this site. Turkey appears twice as articles, a first S-1 slalom with four XL700s at Bodrum and a riding-safety school at Antalya, and the Czech Republic appears once, as the first Eastern European Yamaha Summer Festival at the Brno circuit; none is a dealer profile, model launch or race series. The only European distributor profile with a PWC figure is Germany's, already used, and there is 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.

From: Yamaha News 2005 No.5, Yamaha News 2003 No.5

Caveat

The naming cross-reference is only as good as the mapping behind it, and only the eight pairings printed in the naming section are Yamaha's own. The wider table behind them 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 Yamaha News issue cited here

Issue	Headline
1998 No.4	Mobility for volunteer rescuers
2000 No.3	A Security Role for the Okinawa Summit
2003 No.5	The market share for WaveRunners is 46 percent
2005 No.5	Yamaha began R&D in 1983 that led to our first Water Vehicle

Other sources cited here

Full index of the magazine at Yamaha News PWC index, which says how much of each issue has been read. Yamaha permits personal use only and prohibits redistribution, so nothing here is rehosted or excerpted. Every Yamaha News citation links to Yamaha's own PDF.

The Yamaha rows year by year are in the Yamaha model table. What Yamaha launched in each year is listed in the Yamaha model timeline.

In the model history, by first year
Previous article: Jetpilot: one logo, two companies
Next article: Yamaha on its own machines, 2003 to 2009

Changes to this article

2026-10-02: The note of 2026-10-01 on the 2027 WaveBlaster's horsepower and on-sale date is incomplete rather than the model row wrong: the two Yamaha pages this article cites do not print them, while the model record's row carries 110 hp and a first-quarter 2027 dealer date from Yamaha's own model page for the WB1050A, which that row names and was checked against.
2026-10-02: Seventy-six issues are indexed, not seventy-seven, which leaves thirty-one of them unread beside the forty-five obtained. A duplicate 1996 row left the index on 2026-10-01 in the correction of its 1996 rows against the magazine's own index pages, and this article's figure had not followed.
2026-10-02: The first section's heading counts thirty-six years without a home-market WaveRunner, 1986 to the 2022 model year, where it had said thirty-five above a body that already gave both dates.
2026-10-02: The first section describes the home-market codes as Yamaha's pages print them, one or more letters after the displacement, a hyphenated suffix on the MJ-700VN-R and the export name after MJ on later machines, where it had said two letters for every model family, and it now cites the two dealer magazine issues that index the MJ-700VN-R.
2026-10-02: The record's span opens in 1986, the year its first section starts, where the card and status line had said 1990.
2026-10-02: The English address of Yamaha's marine business history redirected to a missing page on 2026-10-02, so the link to it is dropped, a gaps line records the dead address, and the Japanese page carrying the same text is the copy the first section rests on.
2026-10-02: The naming section lists the eight Japanese-market to export pairings that Yamaha's own cited pages print, where the heading had promised a table the page never showed, and the caveat and gaps count eight pairings rather than four; JDM, VARTM and sponsons are explained at first use.
2026-10-01: The first section now also cites Yamaha's global history page, whose 1993 entry pairs the WaveBlaster 700 with the Marine Jet 700TZ.
2026-10-01: The second section dropped a September 1996 date for Yamaha Technical Review No.22 that the cited PDF does not carry, and a sentence on how Japanese riders refer to the TZ and RZ that rested on a forum.
2026-10-01: The third section dropped a sentence on the Japanese used-parts market that cited nothing.
2026-10-01: The 2027 WaveBlaster is described as a sit-down, as the original was, where the section had called it a stand-up, and its horsepower, unveiling date and on-sale date were removed because neither cited Yamaha page prints them, with the weight comparison restated as 425 pounds, about 193 kilograms, against roughly 149 for the original.
2026-10-01: The drifting MJ-700TZ was found on Johnston Atoll by the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, which carried it to Honolulu, as Yamaha's page has it, rather than by a survey ship.
2026-10-01: The Europe section now describes the Turkish and Czech items as short articles in 2005 No.5 rather than contents-page mentions, names Germany's as the only European distributor profile with a personal watercraft figure, cites 2003 No.5 for it, and no longer cites 2007 No.5.
2026-10-01: The Europe section now counts twenty-five issues of the dealer magazine read in full rather than twenty-one, after four issues nobody had obtained were read at Yamaha's own address.
2026-09-10: The gaps line on the unreadable issues was corrected from eight of twenty-nine issues held to eight of forty-five.
2026-09-09: The first section no longer says the home market has never had a WaveRunner; Yamaha's marine business history, now cited, has Marine Jet as the Japanese name from 1986 until the 2022 model year, when the home-market name was unified with the rest of the world.
2026-09-09: The title was shortened to "Marine Jet, Yamaha's name for the same ski" so the document title fits a search result, and the body did not change.

Every change across the archive.

Cite this page

“Marine Jet, Yamaha's name for the same ski”, BaddJet archive, https://baddjetarchive.com/reference/history/yamaha-japan-and-europe/

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Yamaha · 1986–2027 · 10 sources cited