Defense Minister Itsunori Onodera said the decision was made not to try to bring the missile down because it was not aimed at a target in Japan and there was therefore no danger of the projectile coming down on Japanese territory. He added that it was actually over Japan for less than two minutes.

The projectile was apparently tracked by the three Aegis destroyers, each equipped with Standard Missile-3 interceptor missiles that are constantly deployed in the Sea of Japan. A second layer of close-in defense is provided by the Air Self-Defense Force’s ground-based Patriot Advanced Capability-3 missiles, with the ASDF’s PAC-3 unit in Hokkaido based at Chitose Air base.

“By the time this got over Japan, this thing was very high and moving extremely fast,” Lance Gatling, a defense analyst and president of Tokyo-based Nexial Research Inc., told DW.