TOKYO — It seems an unlikely source of salvation for this city’s run-down, industrial Ota district: a black two-person bobsled about the size of a sofa that sits in a cramped workroom tended by men in blue jumpsuits. Yet, if its creators’ dreams come true, it will race in the Winter Olympics next year as proud proof that this area’s tiny, family-run manufacturing workshops can build a better bobsled than the world’s leading sled makers, a group that includes the likes of Ferrari and BMW.

“The mood has grown so dark in Japanese manufacturing,” said Junichi Hosogai, 46, a leader of the group of 32 small-factory owners who joined up last year to create the bobsled for Japan’s Olympic team. “Beating Ferrari would be a real boost.”

By thus setting its sights, Mr. Hosogai’s group is intentionally making a challenge that echoes Japan’s glory days in the 1960s and ’70s, when the nation captured global industry after industry through hard work, sticking together and making a determined effort to overtake the front-running companies in the West. But Mr. Hosogai and his small band of bobsled builders say this is more than an exercise in nostalgia or morale building.

They say they are trying to rescue a tradition of industrial craftsmanship that once made blue-collar Ota a center for the high-quality manufacturing that propelled Japan to economic greatness. During the district’s heyday, its densely packed neighborhoods teemed with about 20,000 tiny workshops, most no larger than a garage, that churned out the finely crafted metal parts that went into the Japanese-made automobiles, ships and electronics that flooded world markets.