Through the chair, thank you very much, Mr. Chong, for that question. I sound like Ambassador Yamanouchi, but that is a very hard question and an interesting one.
I would say that Japan considers the risk of being directly attacked by North Korea's missiles—not necessarily a land invasion attempt or anything like that—to be higher than the risk of a direct attack by China.
Japan is more worried about a Chinese attempt to reunify Taiwan by force quickly escalating into Japan's own national security crisis because of the geographical proximity between Taiwan and Japan. For that, Japan is certainly enhancing its defence posture in the Southwest Islands. That is geographically super close to the island of Taiwan. We're working very closely with the United States in terms of conducting joint military exercises if deterrence fails so that we could repel such a forceful invasion attempt. Frankly, it welcomes the participation of third countries that have defence co-operation arrangements. Australia is increasingly more present whenever the U.S. and Japan conduct bilateral military exercises focusing on contingency plans for this area.
Since ACSA was put in place in 2019, I'm pretty sure Tokyo would welcome Canada's participation as an observer of U.S.-Japan bilateral exercises focusing on this contingency scenario.