Japan’s Cabinet Office announced on Feb 2 that a state-backed mission has successfully recovered rare‑earth‑bearing mud from seabed deposits around Minami‑Tori‑Shima and said that, if experiments continue to succeed, commercial mining could begin as early as February 2027. The operation is being carried out by the Japanese deep‑sea research vessel Chikyū, which launched what Tokyo describes as the world’s first 6,000‑metre trial of seabed rare‑earth extraction in January.
The trial uses a long riser pipeline with a mining head designed to reach the ocean floor and collect mud enriched in rare‑earth elements; Tokyo says the mission aims to extract about 350 tonnes of rare‑earth mud per day and will run through mid‑February. Japanese surveys estimate more than 16 million tonnes of rare‑earths in the broader Minami‑Tori‑Shima area, a coral atoll roughly 1,950 kilometres southeast of Tokyo.
Tokyo frames the effort as part industrial policy, part strategic insurance. Japan currently imports more than 70% of its rare‑earths from China, and its dependence on heavy rare earths such as dysprosium and terbium approaches 100% for some applications. Beijing’s recent tightening of dual‑use export controls to Japan — announced in January and explicitly aimed at limiting military rearmament — has sharpened Tokyo’s urgency to diversify supplies.
Yet technical, financial and environmental hurdles are formidable. Experts say deep‑sea mining at depths of 6,000 metres requires bespoke vessels, large capital outlays and novel processing and refining technologies; extracting the ore is only the first step, and refining rare‑earth concentrates remains China’s comparative advantage. Environmental groups warn that disturbing deep‑sea sediments could irreversibly damage fragile ecosystems and biodiversity, and regulatory frameworks for large‑scale seabed mining remain contested internationally.
The geopolitical backdrop amplifies the stakes. Chinese officials have acknowledged media coverage of Japan’s efforts while defending recent export measures as necessary to prevent remilitarisation. Japanese industries have reportedly been informed by Chinese suppliers that some contracts will not be renewed, and economic models from Nomura suggest even short interruptions in rare‑earth flows could inflict sizable damage on Japan’s economy.
Realising a commercial operation by 2027 will require Tokyo to overcome a cluster of non‑trivial problems: proving technologies at scale, building or chartering costly ships and processing plants, and navigating domestic and international environmental scrutiny. If Japan can demonstrate economically viable, environmentally acceptable extraction and downstream refining, it would be a strategic win — but more likely near‑term outcomes are incremental supply diversification, stronger Western cooperation on critical minerals, and intensified diplomatic bargaining over export controls and supply‑chain resilience.