KOSAKA, JAPAN - Two decades after global competition drove mines in this corner of Japan to extinction, Kosaka is abuzz with talk of new riches.
The treasures are rare-earth elements and other minerals that are crucial to many Japanese technologies and have so far come almost exclusively from China, the global leader in rare earth mining.
Kosaka's hopes for a mining comeback lie not underground, but in what Japan refers to as urban mining -- recycling the valuable metals and minerals from the country's huge stockpiles of used electronics like cell phones and computers.
"We've literally discovered gold in cell phones," said Tetsuzo Fuyushiba, a former land minister and now opposition party member, who visited here recently to survey the town's recycling plant.
Late last month, amid a diplomatic spat with Tokyo, China started to block exports of certain rare earths to Japan.
The cutoff has caused hand-wringing at Japanese manufacturers because the raw materials are crucial to products as diverse as hybrid electric cars, wind turbines and computer display screens.
In Kosaka, Dowa Holdings, the company that mined here for over a century, has built a recycling plant whose 200-foot-tall furnace renders old electronics parts into a molten stew from which valuable metals and other minerals can be extracted. The salvaged parts come from around Japan and overseas.
The National Institute for Materials Science, a government-affiliated research group, says that used electronics in Japan hold an estimated 300,000 tons of rare earths.
