On July 24, 2026, Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi announced that roughly 50 tons of rare-earth mud had been hauled up from the seabed 6,000 meters down around Minamitorishima, Japan's easternmost point — a world first, she said, with the composition now confirmed: yttrium accounts for 30 percent of the rare-earth content, and heavy rare earths make up 54 percent. Just one day earlier, Japan's mainstream financial press had been delivering grim news: under China's controls on dual-use items, 88.2 percent of surveyed Japanese companies reported their production severely affected, and 17.5 percent had already suspended operations. "Good tidings the day after the obituary" — the commentator TomCat Tuanzuo has named this practice Reiwa Yingxue, "Reiwa Winning Studies": no real results are needed; every event merely has to be packaged as a "win." It is the contemporary edition of the wartime Imperial General Headquarters' communiques — back then Japan needed victory dispatches to stay alive, and today the Japanese government needs good-news bulletins to stay alive.
1. Bad News on July 23, Good News on July 24
The bad news on July 23 came from Japan's own financial media. A survey found that since China imposed controls on dual-use items, 88.2 percent of the Japanese companies surveyed had seen their production severely affected, and 17.5 percent had already halted operations for lack of raw materials. Nearly one company in five shutting down counts as an obituary in any economy.
On July 24, Takaichi promptly turned the funeral into a celebration. Her words were:
Today we announce the results of a collection test confirming the presence of rare-earth mud on the seabed of the exclusive economic zone around Minamitorishima, at Japan's easternmost point. This is the world's first haul of approximately 50 tons of rare-earth mud from a depth of roughly 6,000 meters, and its composition has been clarified. Among the rare earths in the mud, yttrium — which accounts for 30 percent of the rare-earth content — is exceedingly scarce worldwide.
The Japanese cabinet immediately added a supplement: in the rare-earth-bearing sea mud, heavy rare earths account for roughly 54 percent of the total rare-earth content.
In a single day, the story jumped from "companies are barely holding on" to "Japan has won big." The missing middle — whether the rare earths are actually usable, and how much it costs to extract them — nobody mentioned.
2. Thirty Percent Yttrium, 54 Percent Heavy Rare Earths — But Never the Total
Pull Takaichi's announcement apart sentence by sentence and you find that every statement is true, while together they say nothing at all.
The denominators of "30 percent" and "54 percent" are "within the rare earths themselves," not the 50 tons of mud. How much rare earth is actually in those 50 tons? Nobody said. Those 50 tons are a slurry of water and muck; the share of rare earths in the whole pile is too low to mention. The official figures — "30 percent yttrium," "54 percent heavy rare earths" — are proportions inside that tiny sliver of rare earth, nothing more.
And the cost? Even less mentionable. Lifting mud from a 6,000-meter-deep seabed requires stringing together hundreds of pipes and is technically extreme. Japanese experts' own estimates suggest the cost of dredging mud at Minamitorishima could be as much as 1,000 times the price of Chinese rare earths.
Ask about the actual content and you get three blanks; with no denominator offered, who can call it false? Every number is genuine, yet no column is given a real figure — this is the first move of Reiwa Winning Studies.
3. One News Story, Four KPIs Squeezed Out
Since Takaichi took office, Japan's media have released a steady stream of good news about rare earths. The most representative item: "Japan imports heavy rare earths from Australia for the first time."
Unpack that story: the import is real, but the goods were not bought from Australia — they were bought from Malaysia. China holds more than 90 percent of the heavy rare-earth market, and the remainder sits in Malaysia. What Japan purchased was heavy rare earth that had already been separated in Malaysia.
Why, then, write the headline as "imported from Australia"? Because Malaysia is a neutral country and Australia is an ally. Imports from an ally make the supply look far more secure. And the reason Malaysia can separate heavy rare earths is that an Australian company invested in the operation — on the strength of that connection alone, "Malaysian goods" become "Australian goods" in the news.
And the story is not eaten just once:
- By "importing" rare earths from Australia, Japan becomes a "participant" in the US–Australia rare-earth agreement — does supplying a market count as participation? It must.
- When the Malaysian refinery "shifted part of its processes to Australia," that became "supply-chain strengthening" — though in reality the so-called shift merely means that where ore used to be loaded straight onto ships after being dug up, it is now worth rinsing once in Australia.
One news story, multiple interpretations — one fish, four dishes. Every month or two, the Takaichi administration can produce a KPI that leaves the public reassured and exhilarated. Compared with the Imperial General Headquarters' communiques, the technique has improved more than tenfold.
4. Minamitorishima's Five-Step Winning Method
After months of stalling, once China's controls made the deception genuinely unsustainable, the Takaichi administration simply played its ace: the 14-year-old Minamitorishima legend. The beauty of the legend is that every step along the way can be celebrated.
- Step one: the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry sends a scientific survey ship to Minamitorishima. The ship arrives, the first phase is complete — celebrate.
- Step two: the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology announces a "successful mud lift." Note the wording — not successful mining, but lowering a pipe to the seabed, stirring things around, and lifting some mud up. A win again — celebrate.
- Step three: part of the lifted sea mud is actually collected and brought aboard. The technical difficulty is high, the cost is high, the yield is low — but since it came up, it counts as a win of course, and the Japanese media celebrate again.
- Step four: the survey ship returns safely to Japan, docks, and delivers its soil. In Reiwa Winning Studies, even this step counts as a resounding triumph — the Takaichi administration holds a celebration and sends officials to the pier to greet the ship with bouquets.
- Step five: testing. The ship had been back since February 15, but perhaps because the mud was too thin, inspection dragged on for a full five months, until late July, when it was finally announced: "This is the mud — exactly what Japan needs."
Five steps walked through, the winning cycle completes a lap, and it can start again: send the ship once more, lift more mud, collect more mud, bring it home again, test it again — and win every time. From now on, whenever the Takaichi administration faces any hard question on rare earths, it need only repeat the choreography of July 23 to 24: the moment unfavorable news drops, favorable news follows on its heels, and the matter is closed.
5. The 16-Million-Ton Legend and the $250-Million War Chest
This theater was not invented by Takaichi. As early as 2012, Japan's media and government began confirming that heavy rare earths around Minamitorishima were abundant. Fourteen years have passed since — enough time to fight from the Mukden Incident to the dropping of the atomic bombs — and in 2026 Japan announced good news again, confirming once more, yet again, that Minamitorishima's heavy rare earths are abundant.
The legend's war chest: Japan's media assert with full confidence that over 16 million tons of medium and heavy rare earths lie sleeping beneath Japan's seabed. The actual war chest: up until the hype began in 2025, the Minamitorishima project had received a total of less than $250 million in investment from the Japanese government.
That level of spending alone reveals that the project was never about mining from the start. It is a weapon of public opinion: pulled out at crucial moments to string the Japanese public along. Japan's own financial media estimate that even with all-out investment, commercial extraction at Minamitorishima cannot begin before 2030 at the earliest. At current trends, whether the Japanese industries that now need rare earths will even still exist after 2030 is itself an open question.
6. Both Are Called "Winning Studies" — One Actually Wins, the Other Only Performs
The term "winning studies" was not coined by Tuanzuo. After this June's G7 summit, Li Xiang and Wang Xiao observed on a livestream that Italy had entered an "era of great winning" — Giorgia Meloni, by refusing to get entangled, refusing to pick sides, and quietly taking home real benefits, is doing the best of anyone in the G7.
Japan's Reiwa Winning Studies is another thing entirely: it produces no real benefits, only news. Both are called winning studies, but one wins on the ledger and the other wins in the newspapers.
How did Japan get here? Tuanzuo's explanation: the common thread running through all of Japan's domestic politics, diplomacy, and industrial theater is stalling — buying time, soothing domestic sentiment, and ignoring everything else. Officials at the level of Japan's foreign minister now lie to the domestic public, claiming to have communicated with China at such-and-such a meeting — even when such transparent falsehoods can be exposed on the spot, they press ahead regardless.
Having spent so long inside the filter bubble, much of Japanese society sincerely believes that if they keep provoking China long enough, China will lose its temper, launch an attack, and then implode from within — after which Japan can return to 1930 and feed off the East Asian mainland again. That is why Japan keeps making an issue of dates like July 31 and July 7. Whether a person or a country, once idealism goes to the head, they genuinely come to believe the world is a game, and that triggering some specific event can redirect the flow of history.