North Korea has fired two short-range ballistic missiles off its east coast less than a week after a similar test launch, the South Korean military’s joint chiefs of staff (JCS) said.

The latest launches on Wednesday were from the Hodo peninsula on North Korea’s east coast, the same area from where last week’s were conducted, the JCS said in a statement. It said it was monitoring the situation in case of additional launches and maintaining a readiness posture.

“The North’s repeated missile launches are not helpful to an effort to ease tensions on the Korean peninsula and we urge [North Korea] to stop this kind of behaviour,” the JCS statement said.

North Korea test-fired two new short-range ballistic missiles on 25 July, its first missile tests since Kim Jong-un and Donald Trump met in late June and agreed to revive stalled denuclearisation talks.

The Japanese prime minister, Shinzo Abe, said that there had been no impact on his country’s security following the launch and that Japan was working with its allies to address the situation in the region.

“We will continue to closely cooperate with the United States and others,” Abe told reporters on Wednesday.

The White House, the Pentagon and the US state department did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Both Trump and the US secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, played down last week’s launches and Pompeo has continued to express hope for a diplomatic way forward with North Korea.

Since the 30 June meeting in the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) between the two Koreas, Pyongyang has accused Washington of breaking a promise by planning to hold joint military exercises with South Korea in August and warned that these could derail any dialogue.

North Korea has also warned of a possible end to its freeze on nuclear and long-range missile tests in place since 2017, which Trump has repeatedly upheld as evidence of the success of his engagement with Kim.

A February summit in Vietnam between Trump and Kim collapsed after the two sides failed to reconcile differences between Washington’s demands for Pyongyang’s complete denuclearization and North Korean demands for sanctions relief.

A North Korean official told a White House national security council counterpart last week that working-level talks would start very soon, a senior US administration official said earlier on Tuesday.

Trump reiterated to reporters at the White House on Tuesday that he had a good relationship with Kim, but he added: “We’ll see what happens. I can’t tell you what’s going to happen.”

Pompeo said on Monday he hoped working-level talks to revive denuclearization talks could occur “very soon” but emphasized that a follow-up leaders’ summit was not planned.

Pompeo and the North Korean foreign minister, Ri Yong-ho, had been expected to meet on the sidelines of a south-east Asia security forum in Bangkok this week, but Ri canceled his trip to the conference, a diplomatic source said.

On Tuesday, the senior US official also said it appeared Ri would not be in Bangkok.