September 2010.

A Chinese fishing trawler rammed a Japanese Coast Guard vessel in the East China Sea, near the disputed Senkaku Islands. Japan arrested the captain. Two weeks later, ships carrying rare earth oxides to Japan stopped leaving Chinese ports.

No formal ban. No public announcement. Just silence at the docks.

Japan imported nearly all its rare earths from China back then. The metals that went into every hybrid motor, every guidance chip, every hard drive in Tokyo. All of it ran through Chinese ports. And all of it stopped.

So Japan did something most countries talk about but never do. They built a backup plan — stockpiling six months of supply and funding programs to pull neodymium and dysprosium from old electronics. They signed deals with miners in Australia, India, and Vietnam. They started hauling rare earth mud off the Pacific floor, 6,000 meters below the surface.

The playbook was simple. Japan's government agency Jogmec built a national stockpile and bought forward contracts. They gave Lynas, an Australian miner, the money to build a processing plant in Malaysia — on the condition that Japan got first call on the output. They funded magnet recycling at scale. And when scientists found rare earth mud on the Pacific seabed, they launched a program to bring it to the surface.

Sixteen years later, the results are in. Japanese dysprosium-iron alloy imports from China fell 82% in the first half of this year, compared to the same period in 2024. But Japan's factories kept running. Stockpiles held. Alternative suppliers delivered.

Today, the Critical Minerals Japan conference opens in Tokyo. Delegates from dozens of countries are here for two days. They want to study how Japan built the most diverse rare earth supply chain outside China. And they need to move fast. China's extraterritorial rare earth export controls and processing technology controls snap back November 10 — 62 days from now.

The conference covers deep-sea mining, magnet recycling, separation technology, and supply-chain deals. But the real value is in the hallways — the offtake agreements, joint ventures, and technology licenses being signed between panels.

The gap between Japan and everyone else is enormous. The U.S. imported 74% of its rare earths from China between 2018 and 2021. Europe is only now building its first real separation plants. Australia's Lynas is the only large non-Chinese producer, and Japan locked up much of its output years ago. Japan spent sixteen years and billions of dollars building redundancy at every link — from raw ore to finished magnet.

There is a lesson here. You don't build supply security by finding a deposit and hoping the rest works out. You build it backward — from the product your military needs, through every processing step, back to the ore. Japan figured that out when a fishing trawler took its entire supply offline. The question is whether the rest of the world can learn it without a crisis of their own.

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Neo Performance Materials and France's Carester signed a deal last week connecting Carester's rare earth separation plant to Neo's European magnet operations. Carester is building a rare earth separation facility in Lacq, France, set to commission later this year. Neo makes magnets in Estonia. The deal creates a connected chain — feedstock to separation to finished magnets, inside Europe. Most European rare earth projects sit alone. A mine here, a lab there, no link between them. This one ties two emerging operations together. The chain is forming.

Jack Lifton, co-chair of the Critical Minerals Institute, published a piece this week arguing that America's approach to critical minerals is backwards. The country keeps counting deposits and announcing grants. But a mine only matters if its output can reach a qualified buyer through a complete supply chain. Every stage — concentration, separation, metal, alloy, magnet, component — has its own technology and economics. Success at one step says nothing about the next. Lifton wants policymakers to start with one question: what does the military need to build? Then work backward to figure out which mines and plants actually matter. A deposit in the ground and a magnet in a fighter jet are connected by at least six industrial steps. Miss any one, and the chain breaks.

Rare Earth Exchanges flagged a new concern this week: America's electricity transition could pile serious demand pressure onto dysprosium and terbium — the same heavy rare earths already squeezed by China's export controls. Wind turbines need NdFeB magnets with dysprosium to handle high operating temperatures. Grid-scale generators need them too. As the U.S. shifts more power to wind and pushes electrification across transport and industry, magnet demand from the grid alone could strain supply well before 2030. Tellurium, used in thin-film solar panels, faces a similar squeeze. The defense sector is already competing for these materials. Now the energy sector is lining up behind it.

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September is the busiest month on the rare earth calendar. Rare-earth-mining.com counts eight conferences across Asia, Europe, and North America this month. Two years ago, you could count the year's dedicated rare earth events outside China on one hand.

— rare-earth-mining.com

The Association of China Rare Earth Industry set its September 2 index at 262.8, with NdPr oxide at $107–111 per kilogram inside China and dysprosium at $214–221. Outside China, heavy rare earths trade at steep premiums — when they trade at all. The two markets keep drifting further apart.

— Rare Earth Exchanges

The November 10 export control deadline, a stalled Chinese second-half mining quota, and heavy rare earth scarcity are converging at the same time. NdPr prices fell in early September for the first time since May but remain up sharply year-to-date. The next 62 days may be the riskiest window of 2026.

— rare-earth-mining.com

Forbes and Zacks both published September rare earth stock picks, highlighting MP Materials, Energy Fuels, and Lynas Rare Earths. Both cite ex-China supply chain progress and the November 10 deadline as key factors. VanEck's REMX ETF sits near the middle of its 52-week range despite strong year-to-date gains across the rare earth complex.

— Forbes / Zacks