I'm just looking at the clock to see how long I have to answer this. There's a lot there.
The China-Japan relationship turns on a lot of things. They have a territorial dispute between the two of them. Japan, as a user of the South China Sea, is very worried about what the Chinese policy in the South China Sea is, but that relationship turns on a lot more, right? As a consequence of whatever the trade conflict is right now, you actually see China and Japan talking more closely about trade. Japan understands that a China-U.S. trade dispute is not good for them. It's a relationship that has a lot of baggage to it and a lot of security concerns, but both of those countries are capable of being very pragmatic in their bilateral relationship.
As for the South China Sea and where China will go, I think China's end game is a world where it can sail the South China Sea without the United States sailing through there freely—and that takes time. To date, no country of strength has pushed back against China's reclamation activities to make that harder for them to do.
I think part of the reason is that ultimately the South China Sea just isn't that important, frankly, to any country of strength. It's very important to the Southeast Asian countries. It's very important to Japan and the United States as a sea lane, but reclamation activities do not pose an existential threat to the United States—or at least American policy-makers do not accept that they do. I'm sure there are many who would argue that having a missile battery in the South China Sea within range of an aircraft carrier is a big threat, and it is, but the U.S. political elite does not seem to accept that it is an issue in the totality of the U.S.-China relationship. Also, accepting that progress in global climate change is part of that relationship, it hasn't seemed to date that it is an issue upon which they're going to let their relationship collapse, right?
I think China will continue to go as far as any country lets it, and even then, what do you do? If China is occupying an island that it claims as its own, trying to remove the Chinese forces would start a conflict.