North Korea has not only threatened to turn the United States into “ashes and darkness,” but they’ve also threatened neighboring Japan. They have said that they would like to sink Japan with a nuke for the newly imposed United Nations sanctions on the regime.

“Japan is no longer needed to exist near us,” the state-run Korean Central News Agency said on Thursday, citing a statement by the Korea Asia-Pacific Peace Committee. “The four islands of the archipelago should be sunken into the sea by the nuclear bomb of Juche,” it said, a reference to the regime’s ideology of self-reliance. Juche is the North’s ruling ideology that mixes Marxism and an extreme form of forced nationalism preached by state founder Kim Il-sung, the grandfather of the current leader, Kim Jong-un.

Japan’s Chief Cabinet Secretary, Yoshihide Suga, called the comments, “extremely provocative.” Suga continued saying, “If North Korea stays the course that it is on, it will increasingly become isolated from the world. Through implementing the new United Nations Security Council resolution and related agreements, the international community as a whole needs to maximize pressure on North Korea so that it will change its policy,” Suga told reporters on Thursday in Tokyo.

The most recent United Nations sanctions on North Korea came shortly after the regime tested their sixth and most powerful nuclear weapon earlier this month. “A telling blow should be dealt to them who have not yet come to senses after the launch of our ICBM over the Japanese archipelago,” a spokesman for the Korea Asia-Pacific Peace Committee said in a previous statement. The committee is an affiliate of Kim Jong-un’s ruling Workers’ Party.

The remarks about Japan came sandwiched between threats against the U.S. and South Korea. “Now is the time to annihilate the U.S. imperialist aggressors,” the statement on KCNA said. “Let’s vent our spite with mobilization of all retaliation means which have been prepared till now.” The North had also said that South Korean “puppet forces are traitors and dogs of the U.S. as they call for harsher ‘sanctions’ on the fellow countrymen, adding that the “group of pro-American traitors should be severely punished and wiped out with fire attack so that they could no longer survive.”

As we approach what appears to be an imminent war with North Korea, the rhetoric will continue to get more threatening and vile.