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The Roadmap is a 10-year sectoral revival plan jointly issued by MLIT and the Cabinet Office and structured around five strategic pillars: (i) resilience strengthening of domestic supply chains and dock capacity, (ii) human-resource development with re-skilling and foreign-worker inflow programmes, (iii) decarbonisation transformation prioritising ammonia / hydrogen / methanol-fuel ships, (iv) stable newbuilding-demand creation including LCO2 carriers, food-grade vessels, and crude tankers, and (v) like-minded-country collaboration explicitly invoking the Japan-US shipbuilding cooperation MoU signed October 2025.
Quantitative targets and instruments:
(~20% global market share recovery from current ~10%).
commitment over 2026-2034 in three stages — Stage 1 (2026-28) automation & labour-saving capex, Stage 2 (2029-31) facility construction & expansion, Stage 3 (2032-34) dock-operation support and downstream demand-stabilisation contracts.
the FY2025 補正予算 (enacted late December 2025) covers Stage 1's first three fiscal years.
into 1-3 strategic groupings by 2028 — explicitly to match the scale of Korean (HD-Samsung-Hanwha trio) and Chinese (CSSC) peers and to enable bulk procurement of decarbonisation propulsion systems.
The instrument family is industrial-policy (subsidy + state-coordinated consolidation + procurement guarantee), not tariff or export-control — but it is structurally proportionate to the US Section 301 China- Maritime / Logistics / Shipbuilding investigation outcome (April 2025) and tracks the parallel Korean MASGA USD 150 bn US-shipbuilding-fund package announced under the December 2025 US-Korea Strategic Trade and Investment deal.
United, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI), Mitsui E&S, Tsuneishi Shipbuilding, and Namura Shipbuilding — all stand to receive Stage 1 automation capex grants and are the candidate pool for the mandated 1-3 consolidation groupings.
Heavy and Hanwha Ocean (Korea) and CSSC (China) face a credible third-major-pole challenge for the first time since the 2000s; this Roadmap plus Korea's MASGA package together signal a structural shift away from a Korea-China duopoly back toward a Japan-Korea-China near-trilateral with explicit US-aligned bias on the Japan side.
WinGD, J-ENG), hydrogen-fuel-cell suppliers, and methanol-fuel-system vendors gain a quantified Japanese domestic demand backstop tied to the Stage 2/3 decarbonisation pillar.
liquefied-CO2 carriers links the Roadmap to Japan's GX Promotion Act CCS/CCUS deployment timeline (already filed: 2023-05-19-japan-gx-promotion-act).
collaboration" plus the Oct-2025 Japan-US shipbuilding MoU mean US Navy MRO and US-flag commercial newbuilding orders are likely secondary demand channels — separate from but complementary to Korea's MASGA US-domestic shipyard investment route.
guidance vs. legislative amendment to the Shipbuilding Act (造船法) is not yet specified in the Roadmap.
across the seven major yards — competitive vs. capacity-pro-rata.
capital partnerships) under the consolidation mandate.
delivered-output capacity — the Roadmap text uses 建造能力 (construction capacity) which is conventionally read as the former.