Hokkaido waters seen as safe target
Projectile not expected to risk conflict
When nuclear-armed North Korea fired a ballistic missile over Japan this week, it sparked international condemnation. But it also raised the question: why Japan?
It might seem obvious, but geography is frequently a huge factor in geopolitical wrangling. The Japanese archipelago forms a long string off the coast of mainland north Asia, so by definition, any regional player that wants to fire a medium- or long-range missile into the Pacific has to go over it.
Tuesday’s projectile travelled around 2,700km from its launch site near Pyongyang before crashing into the ocean, around 1,200km off Japan’s northern Hokkaido island. Having threatened a few weeks ago to fire missiles towards the US Pacific territory of Guam — around 3,500km away — the range could have been selected to remind Washington that Pyongyang has the capacity to follow through.
But unlike cashing that cheque and risking conflict with the world’s top military power, firing missiles over pacifist Japan was not likely to provoke an armed response. Tuesday’s launch let Pyongyang rattle a major US ally, which hosts American military bases and tens of thousands of US troops, while showing it has the ability to strike Guam if it wants to. “It is also sending a message that Japan is well within its sights if a war breaks out,” Koh Yu-Hwan at Dongguk University said.
North Korea hinted at another reason Japan was in its sights: history. The missile, it said yesterday, was timed to mark the 107th anniversary of the “disgraceful” Japan-Korea treaty of 1910, under which Tokyo colonised the Korean peninsula. The North’s official KCNA news service said leader Kim Jong-un “gave vent to the long-pent grudge of the Korean people” with “a bold plan to make the cruel Japanese islanders insensible on bloody Aug 29”.
Japan’s colonisation of a then-unified Korea ushered in a period of oppressive rule that only ended with Tokyo’s defeat in WWII. Relations have also been strained over the kidnapping of Japanese citizens during the 1970s and 1980s.