The Stalinist state's tightly controlled media, including the Korean Central News Agency, radio and television, all remained mum on the firing of seven missiles, Japanese journalists reported from the capital.

Instead, the state television station as well as the ruling Workers Party newspaper Rodong Sinmun focused on North Korean leader Kim Jong Il's visit to a local factory as their top items.

"There was nothing unusual in the air," a correspondent of Japan's public broadcaster NHK reported from Pyongyang. "We saw people hurry home by buses, streetcars and bicycles as well as on foot."

But he added that one North Korean official, accompanying the small group of Japanese reporters, asked them when told about the missiles: "Will Japan go out of its way to impose economic sanctions?"

The Beijing-based journalists were visiting the secretive communist country at the invitation of Pyongyang to gather information on North Korea's abductions of Japanese nationals in the 1970s and 1980s.

When asked about the missile launches, a North Korean Foreign Ministry official told the group, "We diplomats are not involved in the military's actions, so I don't know."

The official, Ri Pyong Dok, repeated Pyongyang's official line that its missile programme "is something that concerns our sovereignty," according to Kyodo News. "No one else has the right to question whether that is right or wrong."

The weather was fair with a blue sky, a condition seen as ideal by military analysts for a missile test, Kyodo said.

"North Koreans were seen going about in the streets dressed in everyday clothes, including women carrying shopping bags and couples buying chilled drinks at a street corner," a Kyodo journalist reported.

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