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No, not really. Does Japan have a network of defensive and offensive emplacements that had been put in place over decades? Do they have a massive indigenous drone program that does not rely on foreign imports? As a society, are they tightly integrated into the global economy (and hence dependent upon foreign imports) or are they mostly self sufficient? Is their primary foe on the other side of the world with an anemic manufacturing base, or is it directly adjacent to them and with a huge domestic manufacturing base? In another world, Japan could close the south China sea without any problems - but not in this one.
Japan could probably mine the SCS pretty easily with their fleet of submarines, which might close it to international traffic based on the risk profiles we've seen.
They have a pretty large submarine fleet incidentally, nearly as many AIP submarines as China does, and a competitive production rate.
This does nothing to change their position - Japan is far more dependent upon sea-based imports than China, and any kind of escalation will result in them hurting themselves far more than they hurt China. If China was somehow completely cut off from the sea, they'd still have access to extensive land-based trade networks, including Russian fossil fuel supplies. If Japan is cut off from sea-based trade, which China would be able to do far more easily, they have no other options.
Yes, it's absolutely true that Japan versus China wouldn't be much of a contest.
But note that part of the Chinese situation is that they are locked "behind the first island chain" which creates chokepoints. Japan doesn't have the same weakness because their back is to the Pacific.
Is Japan actually capable of preventing China from interdicting traffic to their rear as well? I don't think JP air defence is good enough to prevent China from making the rear approach a logistical impossibility too, even if you ignore their navy.
How would China interdict traffic to their rear?
There are a few ways. Here's how I see it:
Ballistic missiles. Japan has a limited number of ASBMs and would need to guide them via satellite, unless they pushed back Japan's air defense coverage quite a ways and got radar aircraft operating over, say, the sea of Japan. Even then I am not sure if radar would be able to reliably ID ships versus, let's say, very large radar reflectors towed by small boats (not something you want to launch missiles at). Imaging satellites and SAR satellites are nice for this, as long as it doesn't rain or nobody lasers them/jams them to blind them or shoots them down (Japan has SM-3s). So basically, China using its limited stockpile of ballistic missiles on transiting cargo vessels would be possible but annoying, and Japan has hard-kill (Standards, to shoot down the missiles and/or targeting satellites) and plausibly soft-kill (radar jammers and decoys, lasers, cyber, etc.) to interfere with the kill chain. China would also plausibly run out of missiles before Japan ran out of ships.
Submarines. Chinese submarines would need to either take a long detour or pass through the (Japanese-controlled) island chain to break out into the ocean and intercept convoys. And Chinese submarines aren't supposed to be the quietest – I would still assume they are pretty troublesome, though. One issue with submarines, generally, though is that they are louder when they are faster. So lurking in chokepoints is ideal. But it's hard to lurk in chokepoints right next to enemy territory. Japan can rigorously patrol an area around their ports, and Japan has a lot of ports and Chinese submarines would not necessarily know which ones were slated to receive cargo. I think submarines could be effective once they got on station, but it's not risk-free.
(This is why it's very annoying to be e.g. China fighting a joint coalition of the US, Australia, Japan etc. – if the US decides to blockade Malacca, you've got to sail out there and fight them. Whereas if you want to blockade Japan or Taiwan, you've also got to sail out there and fight them.)
Surface ships/carrier aircraft. This has the same problem as the submarines except for instead of being sneaky and underwater you are not so sneaky and very much above the water. It would be nice if China could get a carrier battle group out in the Pacific to interdict trade (setting aside the diplomatic implications of course) but again you're either detouring around Taiwan or you are forcing your way through the island chain in the face of Japanese shore batteries, airstrikes, submarines etc. You would be wary of doing this for the same reason that the US is wary of parking a carrier battle group in the Persian Gulf right now. And this is all really annoying because, again, any path you take to get out into the Japanese rear with a carrier battle group passes under the nose of Taiwan, Vietnam, Singapore, etc. not to mention US spy satellites. In a world of perfect spheres where it's just Japan versus China this might not matter but in the real world with information-sharing (and Twitter posting) this might mean Japan screws up your entire day with a submarine. And even if they don't then you might still need to defeat their (large) navy, possibly supported by shore-based aviation, in a surface battle.
Airstrikes from shore. If this is Perfect Sphere World, the North Koreans and Russians aren't helping you out, which means their airspace is closed to you (this might also prevent you from using your SRBM arsenal against Japan without coming off as very rude as well, incidentally), so instead of fighting over the Sea of Japan you're basically flying out from Shanghai or Qingdao to try to interdict shipping in Tokyo or Sendai.
You will have trouble doing this with bombs from tactical aircraft. The J-16 is a big bird, the J-20, too, but Tokyo - Shanghai is about a 1000 miles and that's if you fly right over Japan and its associated air defenses. The J-16 probably has a combat radius of, like, 600nm miles (it will depend a bit on payload; anti-ship missiles are pretty heavy) - although in theory you could refuel it. Google suggests the J-20 has somewhere in the ballpark of twice that, so you might could fly a J-20 around and bomb ships in Tokyo harbor without flying right over the entirety of Japan, but you're still going to be right on top of Japanese air defenses and fighter/interceptors, who will be operating well within their operational range (whereas you will not be). That matters a lot since your aircraft will have much less time for combat engagements and will be putting in a lot more hours to fly fewer sorties, whereas the JASDF will be able to put up more, shorter sorties – in effect they will be fighting more efficiently. You asked about their air defense – they have more than 300 fighter aircraft (and two aircraft carriers) plus ground-based defenses and their own navy, which as we said might be running convoy duty. So actually carrying out attacks will not be trivial.
You also have your strategic bomber force. You can send bomber raids, escorting them with the J-20s and J-16s, and try to intercept the cargo convoys with antiship missiles – again, though, you have to find them, and that means either turning on the old radar (which can tell everyone that you are there and invite them to shoot you in the face) or find them with EO/IR sensors (which is fine but probably also means you're running the gauntlet of getting spotted by their EO/IR sensors). This is another pretty decent way of overcoming defended convoys as long as you're comfortable with the risk of operating under the threat of Japanese fighter coverage.
I think in Sphere World the Chinese can probably win this. Of course in Sphere World China could probably just nuke Japan, but setting that aside, we're just going to try to destroy as many Japanese fighters on the ground with ballistic missiles as we can and then throw every airplane we have into SEAD/DEAD/CAP until we grind them down and then we are going to do bomber raids out in the Pacific against their fleets until they are sunk and then we will just bomb every ship approaching Japan unopposed. We can combine this with amphibious attacks on the island chain and then, once we've punched a hole in that, send our CBG into the Pacific and screen for their submarines with a dozen frigates. A few ships might get through this but it would probably succeed in shutting down the bulk of trade in a relatively short time.
Now, if this plan seems familiar, it's because it would be similar to the US air campaign against Iran (complete with possibly invading islands and such), except that the US air force is better and larger than that of the Chinese, and the Japanese air force and air defenses navy are better and newer and more numerous than those of the Iranians. In non-sphere world, even if the US was for some reason not going to defend Japan, if China was trying to do it without facing unacceptably high losses you can see how they might actually choke on it. If The Big One happens I think China is going to be extremely busy with the naval target set and might not bother to launch a dedicated anti-shipping campaign (although the mere threat of one might be effective enough in many cases).
But possibly I am missing some obvious options here.
China has access to the same drone technology as Iran, and that's assuming they don't have even more advanced models, which I find highly likely (especially given their close relationship with Russia). Deterring commercial shipping is substantially easier than deterring enemy navies, and entirely possible with drones - especially with drones that cost significantly less to manufacture than the interceptor missiles used to shoot them down, which means China can simply force Japan to use up their entire supply of interceptors. If the interception rate is anywhere below 100% the effects on shipping insurance costs will be ruinous already. Making commercial trade with Japan unviable is infinitely easier for China to do than it is for Japan to strike back in the same way, and at the same time Japan is far more dependent upon foreign imports. China's resource base, trade networks (good luck interdicting trade between China and Russia from Japan) and massive industrial/manufacturing advantage mean that any real long term conflict is simply a matter of time. Even if you make ludicrously charitable assumptions regarding Japan's military capabilities, China's utterly massive economic advantages are enough to make up for them.
I'm not familiar with the concept of "perfect sphere world" so I'm not going to really comment on that aspect - but I will point out that North Korea and Russia are deeply connected with China and will have zero problems with China using their airspace to attack an American vassal state. At the same time, if you talk about America getting involved you have to realise that the pivot to Asia never actually happened - and the US looks like it'll be tied down in the Middle East for a long while yet, in a conflict which is destroying their munition/interceptor stocks and causing immense economic damage. If the US puts together a force capable of challenging China, they have to abandon Europe, Israel and the Middle East - and I don't think Israel is going to allow that (looking forward to seeing renewed press coverage of Trump's ties to Epstein after he tried to pull out of the Iran war again!).
Such drones do not exist, and frankly never really existed.
First off, small drones like DJ quadcopters are a non-factor here (outside of sneak attacks) because they can't travel far enough. So we're looking at cruise missiles (which is what a Shahed really is). The smaller variants (like the 131) aren't serviceable for our purpose because they can't reach, so we're looking at a 136 with long range. Now we can either rely on remote control via satcom (which is going to be vulnerable to jamming) or we can turn them loose with a missile seekerhead.
I don't consider myself exactly an expert in how easy it would be to jam them, but I think possibly it's "really freakin' easy" because GPS jamming doesn't seem to be very hard and even just GPS jamming will likely make cuing a Shahed onto a target difficult because the operator will get lost. Of course, if we're okay accepting the payload penalty and cost increase, we can try to harden, possibly unsuccessfully, against this.
Or you can put an antiship missile seekerhead on it. But you're going to need a sophisticated seekerhead because if you just have a cheap one that says "kill big thing" you're just going to kill 10,000 radar reflectors or get decoyed by ECM. So now you've put the seekhead from a high-performance missile into a platform that has great range but very poor terminal characteristics (by which I mean they are slow and probably not particularly difficult to shoot down).
And you have another problem, which is that your warhead is not that big - 100 pounds, I think Russia put a 200 pound warhead on theirs, presumably at the expense of range. This is not very big for hitting a ship. The Exocet has a warhead of 350 pounds (and is supersonic), the Harpoon is subsonic and has a nearly 500 pound warhead. The Naval Strike Missile has a 260 pound warhead, which is closer in size, but it relies on being able to pick the point of impact on a target. So in order to replicate this with a Shahed, we're adding an artificial intelligence capability (or hoping that our operator is pretty nimble and good at figuring out the weak point on a massive container ship).
Either way, you've basically made an antiship missile, because you've spent the time and money hardening it against defenses and making it smart. But it doesn't have the terminal performance that helps antiship missiles survive CIWS, so you've made a crappy one. You've just spent, oh, let's say 25% of the cost of a real antiship missile and now you've gotten immediately shot down by a crappy gun someone strapped to the deck of a cargo vessel because Shaheds are actually really easy to shoot down (if you get on Twitter you can watch the Ukrainians shoot them down with like everything except one of those joke guns that, when fired, pops a little flag out and says BANG! This is why I say that "drones cheaper than missiles used to shoot them down" have never really existed, any of the cheap drones can be shot down cheaply by air defenses from the Second World War and much more easily with modern kit.)
The main problem with shooting down Shaheds with guns is that the universe of spaces that can be hit with Shaheds is usually bigger than the universe of spaces that can be defended with guns, and the engagement geometry of hitting low-flying Shaheds with point defense can be tricky. In some ways it is much easier to defend ships because
On top of that, the US military very quickly adapted cheap ($20,000 - $30,000, likely competitive with the Shahed, possibly much cheaper now that we've adapted the Shahed into an anti-shipping role) laser-guided rocket that is very good at shooting down Shaheds. I'm sure the Japanese can strap these onto F-2s (and probably lots of other aircraft, including trainers) to quickly cover large amounts of airspace and intercept the Shaheds before they arrive. And they have a larger and, I think, better AWACS force than Russia (about two dozen AWACS aircraft, including modern E-2s with an AESA array). It is hard to detect low-flying drones against ground clutter, but the E-2 is basically going to be one of the best platforms for finding the little buggers.
Finally, to circle back to the thing I mentioned with regard to terminal performance, the slow speed of the Shahed is a huge problem for interdicting ships. A ballistic missile will cross from China to the Pacific in what, 15 minutes? A ship going 20 knots will go 5nm in that time. A Shahed travels at about 115 miles per hour. You're looking at like an eight hour flight time, during which the ship will have traveled more than a hundred miles. Even if you're trying to hit a stationary vessel at dock, a RO-RO or self-discharger can disgorge a lot of material, and then depart or relocate in half that time.
None of this is to deny your point about insurance, although it is likely that insurance would go completely insane just by declaring the area a no-go zone; the Japanese government would likely have to requisition/purchase shipping or subsidize insurance. Similarly, it's undoubtedly true that China is a major industrial power. I am far from convinced that this would be a good way to wage an anti-shipping campaign, but China has a ton of industry, so even if it is the worst possible way to wage an anti-shipping campaign, they might be able to make it work!
It's also not to deny that the Shahed is a good weapon. It is! Particularly against fixed ground targets, and particularly when you can launch large numbers of them and overwhelm air defenses, and most particularly if you can use them as part of a strategy rather than a substitute for one. But if you try to turn it into a reliable antiship missile against distant, well-defended targets you're either introducing cost creep per weapon or you are accepting much less lethality and reliability, which means more missiles per target, which means higher cost again. (If you're inclined to doubt me on this consider that, from what I can tell, the Houthis did not manage to do any serious damage with drones; the ships they sank were hit with a ballistic missiles or USVs.)
My basic point here is that there's a reason that Shaheds have supplemented more conventional weapons systems like ballistic and antiship missiles, rather than replacing them. And similarly that war is hard.
I just mean a world where everything is nice and mathematical, instead of having to deal with messy geopolitics.
If the US fleet and the Chinese fleet fought on an infinite featureless plain the US fleet would win. Everybody knows this. The question everyone is asking is if the United States can prevent China from seizing an island about a hundred miles away from their own territory when the US can bring maybe a third of its fleet to bear and the Chinese have every single advantage of geography. It's possible that the answer is "no" but the fact that that is the question should tell you a lot about the relative power of the two countries. I think it's a war the US could lose but I think the people who tell you it's a war the Chinese would easily win are, well, overly-optimistic.
Au contraire - the shahed drone is itself one of these drones. This isn't because the drones are particularly cheap (although the shahed is both cheap and easy to manufacture), but because the US MIC is fantastically corrupt and so their interceptor missiles are extremely expensive, far more so than the drones themselves. These interceptors are also reliant on materials parts that are sourced from China, who presumably won't be selling them to their military adversaries (yes, the US can source and process themselves - you'll just have to spend a decade or so getting the infrastructure required up and running. Good luck!)
This is in fact the main point I am making. Is it possible to defend against this kind of attack? Absolutely. But is it possible to do so in a way that's sustainable and doesn't prevent the Chinese from achieving their goal of preventing commercial traffic? No. That's all they need to do - render commercial shipping unviable. There are all sorts of unique options available to them - I've heard that they're working on some really cool underwater drones as well, which would be even more fun to shoot down and interdict. But the point remains that the Chinese would be able to prevent Japan from resupplying in any real way while the Japanese would be unable to return the favour. Even if I just abandon the argument about military effectiveness to you entirely, the relative economic impacts on both parties from this kind of strategy is too much to overcome.
I agree - it's just that the Chinese have both, and more importantly the economic and industrial base required to sustain modern warfare for far longer than Japan.
Actually nobody would win - all the ships would just fall over and be unable to move. But the problem is that the industrial base which made the US navy has since been shipped off to China, who, according to the Pentagon, are capable of manufacturing 236 ships to every 1 produced by the US. In any kind of long or sustained conflict, China wins hands down.
The problem is that the reason Taiwan is valuable is the TSMC manufacturing plants, which can be easily destroyed the moment Taiwan looks to be in danger. If China wanted, they could in fact take over Taiwan - especially with the US tied down in Iran. The problem is that taking over Taiwan with military force renders it almost completely worthless, which is why the optimal strategy for the Chinese is to just wait for the US' decline to progress further and then take it bloodlessly.
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