Few airlines fly to UB so it's got to be Air China you are talking about. And their flight goes ULN-PEK. Why you would not be routed on immediately to Tokyo but via TAO first can only be explained by the likelihood of no available award seats on a nonstop PEK-TYO for your travel date.

The connection is potentially troublesome from a visa standpoint. Your total time in China on Transit Without Visa is 24 hours, determined from the time you're scheduled to arrive in PEK to the time you are scheduled to depart from TAO. So if you are arriving on the ULN-PEK flight currently scheduled for 14:00 arrival, you barely qualify but should be OK. But if that ULN-PEK flight for the date you are traveling is scheduled to arrive earlier than 13:40 that day, you have a lack-of-visa issue since your 13:40 departure the following day would put you over 24 hours. Real-time changes in schedule would not be a problem.

You might want to keep checking and see if any award seats open up on a direct PEK-NRT/HND flight, even if for the next morning which would overnight you in Beijing instead of Qingdao.

If you end up staying with your current routing, please report back on this thread after the trip, and let us know how Transit Without Visa in Qingdao went. We have no data points on TWOV for this airport, so your input from firsthand experience would be valuable.