Rare earths

Just Wiki'ed Rare Earth ( only come across this related to magnets), wish I hadn't bothered, I only understood about half the words they used. If I got the gist right, discovery of large amounts of these has to be good for Japan's economy.

Yep, that's what I'm thinking too. At the moment most of it comes from China. Better if one country doesn't have a monopoly.

Unfortunately these accumulations lie up to 20,000 feet under the Pacific and at the moment the technology does not exist to recover them.

They also lie in international waters so Japan may have discovered them but it does not follow that they will get all the benefits of this discovery.