IF SHIGERU ISHIBA, Japan’s defence minister, was having a difficult morning yesterday, the signs were subtle.

There was the note slipped into his hand by an underling during the middle of an interview with The Times, and the minister’s sudden disappearance from the room for an urgent telephone call or off-stage conversation.

And then there was the small white tube, a remedy for nicotine cravings commonly used by Japanese salarymen, which Mr Ishiba sucked on intermittently.

But if anyone could be forgiven for needing a fag yesterday morning, it was Japan’s defence minister. It was Mr Ishiba’s first interview with a Western newspaper and it came on one of the most trying days of his career.

Less than 24 hours earlier, in South Hamyong province in the eastern part of North Korea, a 2.3 tonne Silkworm anti-ship missile had been launched into the Sea of Japan.

As the latest in a series of carefully calculated provocations, it sent shivers of alarm through ministries and intelligence agencies all over the world. But no one faced a tougher task than Mr Ishiba.

As Director-General of the Japan Defence Agency — his official title — he lives and breathes the paradoxes and euphemisms that dominate his country's security policy.

With 240,000 members, Japan’s so-called “Self- Defence Forces” (JSDF) represent one of the most formidable armed forces in the world: and yet Article Nine of Japan's Constitution explictly forbids the maintenance of “war potential”.

To maintain this fiction, the JSDF are permitted to operate only within the strictest limits, to the extent that, if a North Korean missiles made it over the Sea of Japan in the direction of, say, Tokyo, they would be forbidden from acting until after it had been fired.

The head of the world’s most powerful non-military military force, a self-defence force incapable of defending itself, is well aware of the contradictions in his position.

In his interview with The Times yesterday he floated an intriguing and far-reaching idea: that, after 57 years under the protective umbrella of the United States, the time has come for Japan to develop an independent means of preventing missile attack.

“Until the other side actually starts something we cannot exercise self-defence,” he said.

“It has been agreed that Japan is the shield and the US is the arrow, but we have to discuss whether this is adequate or not. Henceforth, this will be discussed in parliament.”

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