The thread started by Earl Kinmonth's question "Does anyone know whether there was an explicit government directive to Japanese media to insert the phrase "it's really a missile" into every single (and I mean every
single) reference to the DPRK satellite launch?"
(2012/04/16) raises a couple of questions to which I offer my own two bits.

I assume that Kinmonth is invoking "an explicit government directive" in jest, given the often testy and sometimes adversarial relationship between government and the media. For such an act would surely become news fodder by itself, and not in a nice way for the administration. However, there actually seems to be more than a half-truth here. Remember that the mainstream media are still organized into mostly autonomous reporters' clubs with vastly superior access to official information from the public institutions that they are attached to. (BTW this prerogative has been eroded significantly under the DPJ regime. There's great value here, I think, for skilled political science quants that have plenty of time on their hands.
Alas, I am not, and do not.) The role of the reporters'
club system is magnified around an event such as the North Korean launch, where much of the information relevant to the reporters is emanating from the institutions to which they are attached-in this case Prime minister's Office, MOD, or MOFA-by way of press briefings, post-ups, and bulletins. Under the pressure of deadlines, it would not be surprising for the reporters (and their editors) to report now and ask questions about definitions and terminology later.

Of course you can usually rely on Sankei to lean to the right and Asahi to the left as far as substance is concerned, but in the case of North Korea, there is a national near-consensus that North Korea is the pits and anything that it does must be evil. (I won't bore you with my explanation of the cause.) So of course it's a "missile" test. Again, I believe that there's a (little less than) half-truth here, to North Korean claims that it's a peaceful satellite launch. Even if it had been successful, the Kimplausible regime's effort may have looked pathetic to us, but it would have had significant domestic juche propaganda value, or at least must be seen that way by North Korean policymakers. I think that the strategic (and domestic
propaganda) value of a nuclear weapons delivery system far outweighs that of the propaganda value of a satellite in orbit, but there is no doubt in my mind that the North Koreans are working on a dual use system.

The other question is: How do the North Korean ballistic missile and nuclear weapons program and events around it drive Japanese defense spending? As for total defense spending, not much.is the way I see it. Despite all the talk around North Korea and the rise of the Chinese military, Japanese defense spending has more or less steadily declined in terms of share of GDP since the mid-nineties. But progress in the North Korean program appears to have had a significant effect on the allocation of the defense budget. Specifically, it was instrumental in convincing the initially reluctant Japanese government to sign on to the ballistic missile defense program. This meant that funds that may have been spent on, say, naval vessels to patrol the EEZ and keep watch on the Senkaku Islands went to BMD R&D and deployment, a turn of events that should have pleased the Chinese, even if they've never shown it.