00:08 John Daub: Hello everybody. Welcome to Tokyo on a beautiful day. And these days you're looking up not at the sky, the clouds, the sun, but to see if there's a missile coming our way. Yeah, this morning we had kind of a scare. For those living in Aomori or up in Hokkaido, you got a notification on your smartphone saying that there was another missile going over the country. It looked like this. It said that at 7:27 a missile was launched from North Korea. It's like a J-Alert, they call it, or part of the special notification system on smartphones.

00:50 John Daub: There are a bunch of other alerts. These notifications scare the crap out of you, to be honest. They come when there are earthquakes usually. But when it comes to a missile and you wake up in the morning, you look at the phone and you're like, you probably jumped out of bed and start looking up at the sky. This is the second time in the last five years that an ICBM was launched over Japan. The last one was in 2017. It went over Japan and landed harmlessly in the Pacific. Maybe a couple of fish got injured or killed, I don't know.

01:28 John Daub: I wanted to give you an idea of what I'm feeling, the mood of the people, what the news is saying here in Japan. And should you be concerned if you visit Japan about a missile attack from North Korea? It's a legitimate thing to worry about because this year alone, North Korea has launched 17 missiles. And from 2019 to 2021, there were 17 launched. And just this year, which isn't even over yet, there's been 17. Probably the only one that you noticed is the one that happened today because that was the one that brought a lot of attention in the Western media. Basically because North Korea probably planned it pretty good. The missile launched at about 7:20 in the morning, which is 6 p.m. on the East Coast of the United States—time perfectly for the evening news.

02:23 John Daub: It went over Japan going Mach 17, or 17 times the speed of sound, according to initial reports. It was probably over before we even got the notification. But it also went up pretty high, about 602 miles into the air, 960 kilometers, evading possible missile defenses. I don't know anything about this except that it does freak me out a little bit. Each time one of these happens, and the last time I was in Hokkaido, people were still talking about it, especially in Nemuro, the easternmost city in Japan. They're pretty worried about that kind of stuff. And that's not striking too far away from Russia as well, to be honest.

03:11 John Daub: Here's where the missile went. You can see North Korea and Japan, that's Hokkaido and Aomori. When North Korea typically launches something like this, it'll go in this direction. So it's not very close to Tokyo. And again, I got messages from people on social media asking if I was okay. I live here in Tokyo, and yeah, I'm fine. Thank you for worrying about me. But we're okay. The missile usually goes up in this direction. If it came over Tokyo, that's a completely different thing. Imagine all the millions of people here getting announcements that there's something incoming. How crazy would that be?

04:00 John Daub: We're getting images on the news about what these missiles look like, and they keep getting bigger and bigger. That's something that scares the crap out of me. Here's a picture of it. There's a graph in the New York Times that shows what was launched our way. You can see gradually larger missiles, and then we have these ICBMs, intercontinental ballistic missiles. The Hwasong-17—it's pretty massive. The 12 is what they launched in 2017, five years ago. And now you can see they got a pretty crazy range on these. No Dong [?], I don't know if that was the name of it.

05:02 John Daub: A lot of the missiles this year didn't actually enter Japan's EEZ, the exclusive economic zone. You can see there's a line between North Korea and Japan. Everything on this side of the line is Japan zone. Most of the missiles this year were landing on that side of the ocean, the Sea of Japan. It's worrying. And I remember whenever I hear a loud noise, it was not that far after the 2017 launch—I was living in a different place, and we had a really loud bang nearby. My initial reaction was that I thought it was possibly a missile that had landed from North Korea. So it does psychologically mess around with you.

06:34 John Daub: Right now in Japan, you can look around—people are pretty relaxed. It's not anything anyone's worrying about anymore. And the news has been showing us these missiles for such a long time, so we're kind of getting tired of it. There's not a lot that Japan can do either. You can't shoot them down, right? Japan can't shoot it down. They're not going to attack North Korea. There's not a lot that can be done. Sanctions—that's already being done. All we can do is just invite them to come here and see how beautiful Japan is, maybe. Say, look, don't ruin this. We have a nice country here. And we've got good sushi.

07:29 John Daub: The Internet's been going crazy about this. There's this weird anomaly in the weather maps from weather satellites to Japan. People on the Internet were wondering if the missile had created this, cutting through the weather pattern—the ICBM. That's from 7:40 this morning. That's pretty crazy, right? Could that actually do something there? Could be fake. People are probably too small to do anything with the weather. But Twitter in Japan is huge here. There's a bunch of weird stuff on Twitter right now that's scaring people. A lot of people are sharing their notifications that popped up on their smartphone. Recently, we've been getting more what to do in case of a missile strike: go indoors, stay down, stay away from windows. The shrapnel will blow the window and the glass becomes dangerous projectiles.

09:20 John Daub: This is what the TV looked like this morning around 7:40. The J-Alert right there on the red bar. That was on the screens for about an hour with weird chimes. But I didn't hear anything out in the city. There were no alarms. And I had a lot of people contacting me asking if Tokyo was okay. The answer is, yeah, we're cool. Should you be worried about this? I don't think so. They're just trying to scare us, and it's working a little bit. But there's nothing we can really do about it.

10:46 John Daub: The Japan Self-Defense Forces should be able to handle stray missiles, but they seem deliberate. This is an ICBM going Mach 17. How does anything catch up to that? I think we're at the point now where there's not much we can do about it. It's going so high and so fast. They've got a lot of self-defense up in Hokkaido—whenever I go up there, I see the jeeps and camouflaged vehicles. But if you're driving around in the lush green of Hokkaido with the wrong camouflage, it's easy to spot. I think we should start to consider this more seriously and have a better plan. This is the second time.

11:56 John Daub: Here's some stats from reputable news outlets like the New York Times and NHK. It's the 17th launch in 2022, so 34 since 2019 from North Korea. This might be the first one you've heard about in the last five years, but there's been a lot coming towards Japan, usually landing outside our EEZ, the exclusive economic zone. None in 2018. But six in total have been launched over Japan since 1998, and the last one was five years ago. Think about that—if an intercontinental ballistic missile is launched over your country, how do you feel? Imagine if North Korea launched those over China or Russia. What would be their response? Perhaps Japan should do something other than just lodge a complaint. Maybe send them gifts like Yubari melons from Hokkaido—they're really delicious.

13:34 John Daub: NHK updated: North Korea ballistic missile flight distance, longest distance ever. This one flew 4,600 kilometers over Aomori Prefecture and believed to have landed in the Pacific Ocean 3,200 kilometers east of Tohoku. So this one only went a fraction of the distance it could possibly go. It's an IRBM, intermediate-range ballistic missile class. Japan can't go there and pluck it out of the sea—it's just too deep. What can you do? My feeling is there's not a lot we can do. I kind of just ignore them now unless they're coming to Tokyo. The scary thing is not that the missiles launch—it's their accuracy that worries me the most. How accurate is it? North Korea's scientists and technology is so bad that it could go totally wrong and actually hit Japan. So far that has not been the case, luckily.

17:08 John Daub: So far it's been harmlessly landing in the ocean. But there's not a lot anybody can do about this. The news has been showing they're not going to be able to confirm which missile it was. What they're doing is real-world testing of these missiles. Nobody really wants a war with North Korea, but they just want respect, I guess. Why don't they just do launches digitally? Apple or Google could come up with augmented reality for them. It would save us all.

18:03 John Daub: If you were in the area up in Hokkaido, you want to share a story, go ahead and leave it in the comments below. But I'm actually here not for the missiles. I just bought the stamps for the postcard club—150 years of railroads in Japan. There's the first train from Shinbashi to Yokohama. People in the postcard club are going to get the Shinkansen streaming by Mount Fuji at top speed over the Fuji River and one of these train stamps. I'll send it from Shinbashi Station, which is where the first railway station in Japan was—the first train in 1872. Yeah, this is a pretty nice looking postcard this month.

19:35 John Daub: If you're on Discord, you can check it out—I'll post a photo. I love the stamps and the cancel stamps that say Japan on it, sometimes the station like Tokyo Station, which I usually send from, or Hokkaido. The last one from the Kickstarter had a Hokkaido stamp, which is pretty cool. So I appreciate the support, guys. All right, take care. We're all good to go—no missile in the air here. See you tomorrow in Kyushu. I'm flying to Kagoshima in the morning airport livestream. Bye, everybody. No panic. No problem.