‘Japan will learn with a shudder’ its military buildup was ‘wrong choice’, says North Korea

North Korea has threatened to take “bold and decisive military steps” against Japan and said the country will learn with “a shuddering shiver”, the consequences of gearing up to build up its defence forces.

Last week, Japan’s prime minister Fumio Kishida announced the £263bn military buildup plan that will be its biggest since the Second World War.

He said the move was “the answer to the various security challenges that we face” and described Japan’s people as being at a “turning point in history”.

On Tuesday, North Korea’s foreign ministry issued a statement and accused Tokyo of attempting to acquire “pre-emptive capability meant to launch strikes on other countries’ territories” and said its claim of building up its counterstrike capacity for self-defence was a lie.

“Japan’s foolish attempt to satiate its black-hearted greed – the building up of its military invasion capability with the pretext of a legitimate exercise of self-defence rights – cannot be justified and tolerated,” said the country’s foreign ministry spokesperson who was not identified by state media.

The scathing statement by Pyongyang threatened Japan by warning “that it made a wrong and very dangerous option”, and that “Japan will learn with a shuddering shiver”.

The statement was carried by the KCNA news agency and criticised the US for “conniving and instigating Japan’s rearmament and reinvasion scheme”, adding that the US had no right to question North Korea’s defences.

“Japan is a war criminal state which inflicted untold misfortune and sufferings upon the Korean people in the past and has not yet honestly liquidated its past crimes,” the foreign ministry spokesperson continued, “and it has been branded as an enemy state in the UN Charter. It will never be welcomed that such country [sic] has openly revealed its dangerous scheme.”

North Korea claims that “with Japan’s formulation of its new aggression line, the security environment in East Asia has undergone a radical change”.

The official added that North Korea “has the right to take a resolute and decisive military step to defend its national sovereignty, territorial integrity and fundamental interests in the light of the complexity of the regional security environment caused by Japan’s action”.

Anti-Japanese sentiments still run deep in North Korea because of Japan’s wartime atrocities. The Korean peninsula was under Japanese rule before being split into North and South Korea. While South Korea and Japan, both capitalist economies, are allies, North Korea leaned towards the Soviet Union and China.

On Sunday, North Korea fired two ballistic missiles towards the sea off the Korean peninsula’s east coast. Japan’s vice defence minister Toshiro Ino said the missiles seemed to have landed outside Japan’s exclusive economic zone.