North Korea's plan to launch a rocket on a trajectory over Japan and toward Hawai'i prompted a couple of false alarms.

The North carried out the launch today. The rocket flew over Japan and a stage of the rocket landed in the Pacific Ocean, Japanese broadcaster NHK said.

On Friday, guests at the Four Seasons Resort Lana'i at Manele Bay were warned to get off the beach and seek shelter.

Maui County spokeswoman Mahina Martin said state and county Civil Defense officials had been monitoring North Korea's preparations for a launch, and police had advised the hotel that if the launch occurred and debris seemed likely to fall near the Islands, beachgoers should go inside and avoid the western and southern shores.

Debris from the second stage of the rocket was expected to fall in the Pacific between Japan and Hawai'i.

"It was a good example of miscommunication," Martin said. "Out of that sharing of information, the Manele Bay hotel took what I would call good preparedness measures and started to initiate a nonmandatory evacuation of Manele Bay."

But the hotel's response was "unnecessary," she said.

"It was a good exercise in preparedness. We appreciate them wanting to be that cautious, but this was far beyond the information that was shared," she said.

Police soon stopped the evacuation, Martin said.

Yesterday, the Japanese government also raised a false alarm over the missile launch.

Japanese officials yesterday said that an object appeared to have been launched from North Korea, but five minutes later determined that no object had been confirmed by other monitoring systems.

According to the Defense Ministry, an FPS-5 radar warning and control system — nicknamed "Gamera" after the turtle monster of movie fame — at the ministry's Technical Research and Development Institute Iioka branch in Asahi, Chiba Prefecture, detected something over the Sea of Japan.

The information picked up by the advanced radar system was relayed to the government as a potential missile launch. The ministry said it is analyzing what was detected by the radar.

The Maui News and the Yomiuri Shimbun contributed to this report.