2013, Tokyo, and the Missile That Finally Came

When I was in Japan the second time, in 2013, the anxiety simmering in the background was North Korea. The story going around was that Kim Jong-un might fire a ballistic missile at Tokyo at any moment. We weren’t exactly afraid—there’s something about being a tourist that insulates you from real dread—but watching the missile defense installations get quietly distributed across the city had a way of making the theoretical feel suddenly close.

He finally did it. Last night a missile was launched from near Pyongyang, flew approximately 2,700 kilometers over the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido, and landed in the Pacific about 1,180 kilometers to the east. The Japanese government sent emergency alerts to mobile phones ordering people to take cover immediately. On Reddit, someone described being mid-game, chatting with friends on Discord, when the message arrived: I thought I was about to die in a nuclear explosion.

The missile passed over. Nobody died. Now the world gets its familiar circuit of condemnation—UN statements, strained press conferences, Chinese expressions of concern that don’t actually commit to anything. And somewhere in Tokyo, the people staffing those missile defense installations I noticed in 2013 are presumably filing paperwork and trying to explain to someone what this morning was like.