North Korea’s latest missile launch over Japan signals new level of provocation the Japanese are unprepared for
For anyone on the missile’s flight path it was a rude and frightening awakening. Chris Broad was travelling in northern Japan when the alarms sounded in the street and his phone began buzzing with text alerts. Looking bleary eyed in a video posted to his Abroad in Japan blog he said: “I don’ t know if it’s real or not but it’s not a nice way to wake up in the morning.”
Ten minutes later he received another text alert saying he was now directly beneath the flight line of the missile. “The emergency alert said the missile flew overhead … so I had better look that up”
TV and radio stations interrupted normal programming to broadcast alerts. In the northern parts of the country sirens went off, while loudspeakers warned them they were under the path of a missile.
At 6.06am, four minutes after the first public warning, and eight minutes since its launch at 5.58am, the missile entered air space hundreds of kilometres over Hokkaido, the northernmost of Japan’s main islands.
In earthquake and tsunami-prone Japan, many people have become used to mass alert systems, but this latest ‘J-Alert’ was the most widespread since the system was launched in 2007.
The threat of North Korean missiles has been looming large over Japan since Kim Jong-un dramatically upped its nuclear testing programme.
