Hokkaido officials and Japan’s Self-Defense Force personnel are seen in a prefectural government building in Sapporo
on Friday,after a North Koreanballistic missile flew over Hokkaido. Photo: KYODO
TOKYO:The entire international community must come together to stop the threat from North Korea, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said Friday after the North again launched a ballistic missile over northern Japan into the Pacific Ocean.
“Now is the time when the international community is required to unite against North Korea’s provocative acts, which threaten world peace,” Abe told reporters at his office shortly after arriving back in Tokyo from a trip to India.
“We must make North Korea understand that if it continues down this road, it will not have a bright future,” he said.
The missile followed a similar course to one North Korea fired over Japan’s northernmost main island of Hokkaido on Aug 29, but the Japanese government said it covered a distance of around 3,700 kilometers, the longest of any North Korean missile test so far.
As requested by Abe, the U.N. Security Council has decided to hold an emergency session later in the day, said Ethiopia, president of the 15-member council for the month of September.
Friday’s launch follows the Security Council’s adoption this week of a new sanctions resolution with tougher measures against North Korea, including moves against its trade in oil and petroleum products, in the wake of a sixth nuclear test on Sept. 3.
Pyongyang has said that the test was of a hydrogen bomb that can be mounted on an intercontinental ballistic missile.
Abe is set to call for the international community to unite in putting pressure on North Korea when he attends the U.N. General Assembly’s general debate in New York next week.
Japanese Foreign Minister Taro Kono said he agreed with U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to start making arrangements to hold trilateral talks, including South Korean Foreign Minister Kang Kyung Wha, on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly.
Kono told reporters that he confirmed with Tillerson during their telephone talks Friday that Japan, the United States and South Korea will work closely for U.N. sanctions on Pyongyang to be “completely” implemented by all nations.
The latest missile launch is a “strong challenge to the international community,” Kono said. “We will put maximum pressure on North Korea and we want (the country) to come to the table for talks after showing a clear commitment to denuclearization.”
Later in the day, Kono said he also held a telephone conversation with Kang and they shared the view that now is the “time for pressure” on North Korea.
Earlier Friday, the Japanese government’s top spokesman said Tokyo had lodged a protest with North Korea over the launch, which set off evacuation alerts over a wide area.
Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga told a press conference the missile was launched at around 6:57 a.m. Japan time from a western coastal area of North Korea, before passing over Hokkaido around 7:06 a.m.
Having reached a maximum altitude of 800 km, it landed in the Pacific Ocean about 2,200 km east of Cape Erimo at around 7:16 a.m., Suga said.
Suga said the missile did not appear to have been launched on the especially steep “lofted” trajectories common to previous launches of ballistic missiles into the Sea of Japan.
Defense Minister Itsunori Onodera said the missile could have been an intermediate-range Hwasong-12 type and would have reached the U.S. Pacific territory of Guam if fired in that direction.
Onodera also told reporters that he held telephone talks with U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and they confirmed Tokyo and Washington will continue to put “visible” pressure on North Korea.
The government’s J-Alert emergency warning system went off in Hokkaido and 11 other prefectures, the same areas as for the Aug. 29 launch, warning residents to take shelter inside sturdy buildings or underground.
As in previous launches, parts of Japan’s railway system in the affected areas temporarily ground to a halt.
Suga said the government has not received any reports of damage from aircraft or ships around Japan.
He defended Japan’s decision not to try to shoot down the missile, saying the Self-Defense Forces had been monitoring it since the launch and judged it would not land on Japanese territory.
Deputy Prime Minister Taro Aso, meanwhile, suggested the response by the international community to North Korea so far — applying progressively stricter U.N. sanctions — may no longer be enough to combat the threat from Pyongyang.
“In a situation in which (North Korea) has been completely ignoring the repeated sanctions resolutions, perhaps the way we’ve been doing things until now hasn’t had enough of an effect,” Aso, who doubles as finance minister, said after a cabinet meeting.
