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After 27 missile launches in two days, including a long-range projectile that failed to overpass Japan and another that crossed a nautical border with South Korea, one thing is clear: North Korea is getting diminishing returns from its theatrics.
During the “fire and fury” era in 2017, a missile overpass of Japan caused gold to rise, Japanese stocks to fall and Treasuries to rally, as a military confrontation seemed to some to be inevitable. These days, markets are more concerned with Jerome Powell than Kim Jong Un.
That might be partly explained by the fact that Japan was enjoying a sleepy fall holiday when the suspected intercontinental ballistic missile was launched. But Pyongyang’s sound and fury increasingly signifies very little. Useful as they may be to intelligence agencies looking to gauge an enemy’s capabilities, the missile launches have long since lost the ability to scare.
Some bullet train services were briefly halted Thursday after Tokyo issued an alert for a likely failed test of an intercontinental ballistic missile, initially thought to have overflown the country. It hardly rocked Asian markets.
Appropriately, the unprecedented missile salvo came just days after Halloween, when people are generally bored of the same old tricks. One launch triggered the first air raid alert in South Korea since 2016, prompting residents to evacuate to underground shelters, with a missile landing close to Seoul’s territorial waters. Japan’s alert, warning residents in the north of the country to take shelter, was the second such incident in two months. Footage showed the disturbing J-Alert siren echoing through the early-morning autumn sun in towns such as Ishinomaki, which was devastated by the tsunami in 2011.
But this was no 2017, nor a 1998, the watershed moment when Pyongyang first lofted a missile over the country. That was followed by intensified talks on normalizing relations between the two countries, something almost impossible to imagine in 2022. Within a few years of that scare, then-Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi made a groundbreaking visit to Pyongyang, shaking hands with Kim Jong Il and securing the release of several Japanese citizens abducted by the regime.
Kim succeeded this time only in extending the US-South Korea Vigilant Storm air drills he was protesting with the barrage. Over the long term, the more likely impact from the recent salvo is to amplify the voices of Japan’s defense hawks, who are calling for greater spending to defend the country from such threats.
Even under the relatively dovish Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, such voices are now in the ascendancy. The Sankei reported this week that the government plans to boost defense spending over the next five years to a total of 48 trillion yen ($325 billion) in an updated midterm defense plan due this year. That’s 1.7 times the current equivalent, as the US pushes its ally to increase defense spending to 2% of gross domestic product from its long-held unofficial cap of 1%.
Just as significant was the news that Japan is mulling developing and deploying homegrown hypersonic missiles by the end of the decade. Considering that’s a technology the US has yet to deploy, such a plan would demonstrate Tokyo’s commitment to building out its counter-offensive capabilities. The country also reportedly plans to purchase Tomahawk cruise missiles from the US to tide it over until it can deploy more advanced, made-in-Japan technologies.
For a country that had been retreating from the defense industry, and less than a decade ago saw tens of thousands take to the streets and fisticuffs in parliament protesting tweaks to security legislation, the new stance represents a momentous shift. Increasingly, it’s one backed by the public: Surrounded by a hostile trio of China, North Korea and Russia, citizens’ long standing opposition to defense spending has been shifting. Just one-third of those polled in an NHK survey last month opposed increasing such spending.
Home to more than 50,000 US military personnel, Japan has long been in North Korean firing lines. In some ways, the threat has become another of the unpredictable and potentially devastating disasters the country has simply learned to endure — and spend on avoiding or mitigating. Thursday’s ICBM might not have overflown the country. But Japan now knows real and greater threats are not far away.
More From Bloomberg Opinion:
• Kim’s Right, North Korea Is a Nuclear State: Gearoid Reidy
• US-South Korea War Games Have a Global Audience: James Stavridis
• The Race for Missiles in Asia’s Danger Zone: Gearoid Reidy
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Gearoid Reidy is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Japan and the Koreas. He previously led the breaking news team in North Asia, and was the Tokyo deputy bureau chief.
More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com/opinion
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