You should also know that we have raised our recruiting goal for next year to 3,000 new agents. The vast majority of these newly recruited agents are individual agents rather than corporate agencies. In the short to near term, individual agents give us better access to the direct market and a tremendous market of smaller businesses, or those with 100 or fewer employees. To this market we can continue to sell our founding product as well as more recently developed policies. In the longer term, we believe that enhanced retail distribution will benefit us in the more competitive, deregulated marketplace.
New products continue to do very well in Japan.
Through the first nine months of the year, we have sold nearly 700,000 Rider MAX policies, and it was just introduced in January of this year. Cancer life sales are also very strong this year. Looking ahead, we believe our sales growth in Japan will continue. However, because our sales began improving in the fourth quarter of 1997, the comparisons to this year's fourth quarter will be more typical than in the second and third quarters. In the United States, new annualized premium sales were also very strong and extended our momentum.