TOKYO/SEOUL: Hundreds of residents of a small Japanese coastal town took part in an evacuation drill on Sunday as fears grow that a North Korean missile could hit the country.
The drill in the town of Abu, about 800 kilometres west of Tokyo facing the Sea of Japan, simulated a ballistic missile attack in the surrounding mountains in Yamaguchi prefecture which hosts a major US Marine Corps air station, a disaster agency official said.
It came less than a week after the nuclear-armed North test-fired a short-range projectile which fell provocatively close to Japan, its 12th ballistic missile test this year — in defiance of UN sanctions warnings and US threats of possible military action.
TV footage from Abu showed young children holding hands as they ran to a school gymnasium doubling as an evacuation centre after a siren began blaring early on Sunday.
“I was able to stay calm and evacuated in a few minutes,” 67-year-old Yuriko Suewaka, who was among the 280 people involved in the exercise, told Jiji Press.
The drill, organised by central and local authorities, followed a similar exercise in March in the northern prefecture of Akita.
There are plans to conduct drills later this month in Yamagata and Niigata, north of Tokyo, both of which face the Sea of Japan, the official said.
“The government has requested local communities to prepare for the holding of an evacuation drill,” he said on condition of anonymity.
The southwestern city of Onojo in Fukuoka prefecture also held a drill on Sunday, independently from the central government, the official added.
North Korea says rejects new sanctions: Meanwhile, North Korea’s foreign ministry spokesman said the country “fully rejects” the latest UN sanctions against its citizens and entities as a “hostile act” and will continue its nuclear weapons development without a delay.
The UN Security Council on Friday expanded targeted sanctions against North Korea after its repeated missile tests, adopting the first such resolution agreed by the United States and Pyongyang’s only major ally China since US President Donald Trump took office.
The sanctions resolution “is a crafty hostile act with the purpose of putting a curb on the DPRK’s buildup of nuclear forces, disarming it and causing economic suffocation to it,” the foreign ministry spokesman said in a statement carried by its official KCNA news agency. DPRK is short for Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, the North’s official name.
“Whatever sanctions and pressure may follow, we will not flinch from the road to build up nuclear forces which was chosen to defend the sovereignty of the country and the rights to national existence and will move forward towards the final victory,” the spokesman said.
North Korea blamed the United States and China for “railroading and enforcing” the sanctions resolution at the UN Security Council “after having drafted it in the backroom at their own pleasure.”
“It is a fatal miscalculation if the countries... would even think that they can delay or hold in check the eye-opening development of the (North’s) nuclear forces even for a moment,” the spokesman said.
— AFP/Reuters
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