Leadership Quote by Shintaro Ishihara

Ishihara’s line lands like a dare dressed up as reassurance: go ahead, bomb Japan, it’s fine because it won’t be nuclear. That’s not a policy argument so much as a provocation engineered for a domestic audience primed to feel constrained, humiliated, or left out of the “real” security conversation. By minimizing the threat (“nasty missile” but not a nuclear warhead), he converts fear into indignation and, crucially, into permission: permission to speak more openly about force, deterrence, and the taboos that postwar Japan has carried like a civic identity.

The subtext is a familiar Ishihara move: posture toughness by treating catastrophe as manageable. “Let them” is the tell. It implies Japan is currently overcautious, perhaps infantilized by allies, international norms, and its own constitution. The phrase simultaneously flatters national resilience and scolds national restraint. It also nudges listeners toward a more hawkish conclusion without having to spell it out: if conventional strikes are survivable, then Japan should stop acting as if pacifism is the only moral posture available.

Context matters because Japan’s security debate has long been haunted by the singular trauma of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the legal-ethical architecture built afterward. In that landscape, casually separating “missile” from “nuclear” is not neutral; it’s rhetorical surgery, cutting away the most sacred caution sign so the rest of the argument can move. Ishihara isn’t predicting reality so much as trying to rewire it: normalize the idea of being targeted, then leverage that normalization to justify a harder, less apologetic Japan.