September 7, 2010. The East China Sea.

A Chinese fishing trawler rammed two Japanese Coast Guard ships near the Senkaku Islands. The crew scattered. The captain, a man named Zhan Qixiong, was dragged off the deck in handcuffs. Tokyo called it law enforcement. Beijing called it an act of war.

Within days, China did something it had never done before. It cut off rare earth exports to Japan. No warning. No public announcement. Customs agents simply stopped letting the shipments through.

Japan panicked. The country depended on China for about 90% of its rare earth imports. Those metals went into every car motor, every hard drive, every factory robot on its assembly lines. Toyota scrambled. Hitachi scrambled. The whole economy held its breath for two months until the shipments started again.

That was sixteen years ago. Japan spent the next decade trying to make sure it would never happen again. It stockpiled. It invested in recycling. It funded mines in Australia. And for a while, it looked like the lesson had stuck.

It didn't. This week, Reuters reported that a shortage of critical minerals is starting to hit the broader Japanese economy. Corporate filings show an unprecedented rise in warnings about rare earth supply. The trigger this time was not a fishing boat. It was a sentence.

In November 2025, Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi told Japan's parliament that a Chinese attack on Taiwan could constitute a 'survival-threatening situation' for Japan. Beijing's answer came in January: a ban on dual-use exports to Japan, including rare earths. Six months later, the damage is showing up in earnings reports, factory orders, and supply chain filings across the country.

The difference between 2010 and now is scale. In 2010, the cutoff lasted two months and the world barely noticed. This one has lasted six months and counting. Takaichi is banking on the G7 minerals alliance agreed in June and some new recycling projects at home. Yuriy Humber runs the Yuri Group, a Tokyo consultancy. He put it bluntly: "A year of export restrictions will create big problems and we're five to six months into that."

Japan has the third-largest economy on earth. It builds the robots, the cars, and the chips the world runs on. And right now, it cannot get enough of the metals it needs to keep doing that. The Nikkei keeps hitting records. The Tankan survey says business confidence is strong. But underneath the good numbers, the filings tell a different story. The last time China turned the tap off, Japan had two months of pain and a decade of preparation. This time, the tap has been off for half a year — and the backup plan isn't ready.

Immediately after secretly redacting 750 White House files behind closed doors…

President Donald J. Trump wrote a check worth $300 million of his own money and strangely enough… didn't utter a single word about it to the cameras.

Even more fascinating, it turns out, Trump's not acting alone…

If you follow the money trail…

Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett, Bill Gates… even an up-and-coming tech titan who the late Charlie Munger referred to as, "the new emperor of the world"… have all poured billions into the same area.

Click here to see all the details.

On June 17, G7 leaders met in Évian-les-Bains, France, and launched a Critical Minerals Alliance with one goal: cut reliance on any single supplier outside the G7 and partner countries to below 60% by 2030. The alliance comes with a crisis platform run through the IEA, a stockpile coordination plan, and roughly €64 billion across 195 announced projects. China's foreign ministry responded within a day, defending its export controls and urging the G7 to stop imposing 'small clique' rules. Two parallel systems are forming. The question is which one gets built first.

MP Materials filed a lawsuit in Texas on May 22 accusing USA Rare Earth of stealing proprietary magnet technology through a former employee. The case centers on grain-boundary-diffusion tech — the process that makes NdFeB magnets hold up in extreme heat. Both companies are racing to build end-to-end rare earth supply chains. Both received federal backing. And both were named on China's June 22 export control list. The Wall Street Journal called it a fight over who becomes America's rare earth champion.

The blended neodymium-praseodymium alloy — the main feedstock for NdFeB permanent magnets — surged 21.4% in June alone to $133/kg on China's SMM benchmark. That reverses the April and May pullback and marks a new high for the year. Outside China, the picture is even sharper. At retail investor prices, neodymium sells for about $245/kg versus $146/kg inside China. That $99 gap is the cost of not being Chinese. Dysprosium shows the same pattern: $931 at retail, roughly $200 inside. The rally is being driven by stronger-than-expected EV sales — 22.9 million units forecast for 2026, up about 6.6% year over year — and tightening supply as China's export controls squeeze what leaves the country. The next date to watch is when Beijing sets its second-half mining quotas.

Yuriy Humber, CEO of Yuri Group (Tokyo), quoted by Reuters
July 7, 2026

Neodymium magnets are powerful, but they have a weakness: heat. Push an NdFeB magnet past 150°C and it starts to lose its grip. That is a problem when your magnet sits inside an EV motor or a jet engine. Terbium fixes it. A tiny addition — just 0.5–2% of the alloy — lets the magnet hold its strength at extreme temperatures. There is no substitute. The retail investor price tells the story: $4,029 per kilogram today, up 103% this year on that basis. Industrial terbium prices have risen roughly 121% since 2020. Terbium does not occur naturally on its own. It is one of the hardest rare earths to separate, and almost all of it comes from China.

Beijing announced a new hotline in late June that pays citizens to report rare earth export violations. Reports confirmed by authorities will earn financial rewards. The move follows the detention of two Japanese nationals in Dalian on smuggling charges. It is part of a broader crackdown on illegal mineral exports that now covers mining, refining, and finished goods.

— Reuters

Iluka Resources secured a non-recourse loan from Canberra for the Eneabba rare earth refinery in Western Australia. The site is now over 50% built and aims to be 75% complete by year-end. It will be Australia's first fully integrated rare earth refinery — separation, refining, and oxide production in one place.

— Reuters / Finimize

Critical Minerals Institute co-chair Jack Lifton wrote this week that the West does not have a mining problem. It has an expertise problem. The real bottleneck is the people and know-how to refine ore, alloy it, and turn it into magnets that buyers will accept. He called the gap between public ambition and factory-floor reality the sector's biggest risk.

— InvestorNews

Starting January 1, 2027, U.S. defense contractors are barred from using rare earth magnets with any stage of production traced to China, Russia, Iran, or North Korea. The rule covers NdFeB and SmCo magnets, tungsten, and tantalum. Six months out, most of the non-Chinese supply chain still isn't at commercial scale.

— Rare Earth Exchanges