Mines are a two way thing, lay enough of them and a harbour becomes almost worthless. As for the rest of it, night attacks would nullify a lot of the defensive superiority of the forts, since it's harder to turn off all the lights in a city than all the lights on a warship.
A biting inferiority complex, the Italians way overestimated the local defences, and suspected their own forces were a pile of scrap metal in comparison.
Except that I'm in no way talking about the Japanese duking it out with the Vladivostok forts, just plastering the harbour into near uselessness.
You can't have one without the other. You can't blow the pougies out of the harbor with naval shelling and not have to engage the forts. You simply can't. The Soviets had guns ranging in size all the way up to 14" defending the port, including a number of 180mm rifles (interestingly, these are the same size guns as the U.S. had on Midway, although the U.S nomenclature was 7"), so it isn't like the IJN can sit eight miles out to sea and fire away. If they are in range, the shore guns are in range.
If the Japanese try to do it from the air, they will be in place for weeks, if not months. The Soviets do have a number of submarines as part of their Pacific force, weak in surface units as it was. There were around 35 operational
Shchuka class boats along with a number of "S" class &
Leninets class boats that brought the operational total to around fifty hulls.
The Japanese, as was amply demonstrated, sucked at ASW. Japanese carriers, again, as amply demonstrated, were death traps when they suffered serious bomb or torpedo damage. Soviet submarines were, by far, the most effective branch of the Navy (for understandable reasons). Soviet torpedoes and mines worked very well, something that KM and Reich merchants found to their dismay.