This and their pathetic ASW capabilities early in the war was their biggest issues IMO. Their sonar sucked and wasn't very good until the very end of the war.
Their strategy of “Death before dishonor” cost them dearly. They lost almost all their good pilots by 1943. Shoot, they could have taken Midway on the way home from Pearl Harbor. It’s amazing that we did come back on them so quickly.
I don’t think they had the ability to take away. One, on their best day, they never had the amphibious assault capability the United States had. It’s one thing to land 1500 Japanese Marines on Wake Island facing six 5 inch guns. It’s a whole other kettle of fish to take enormous Hawaii, with the remainder of a very pissed-off u.s. Fleet, Battleship sized Coast defense guns strategically arranged on High Ground around the island. And a fairly large US Army Force. Add in that it was beyond the range of any land-based bombers for support. Taking hawaii was never in the cards for them.
If at least two of our carriers had been in Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Japanese decision-making on that day would have been much, much different. Nagumo would have ordered the third strike, destroying our fuel and maintenance facilities. With little capability to repair and sustain our forces, we would have been forced to withdraw what was left of the fleet to the west coast, leaving Hawaii wide open to invasion. Our first major amphibious operation would have been the retaking of Oahu, not Guadalcanal. Under that scenario, it’s easy to envision the war stretching into 1947 or 1948, with far greater casualties on both sides.
It’s also interesting to speculate how an even greater disaster at Pearl Harbor would have impacted our “Europe first” strategy. There would have been a tremendous clamor (publicly and politically) to beef up military forces on the west coast, in preparation for a Japanese invasion that was never a real possibility. The need to defend the coast and begin preparations to retake Hawaii would have delayed our timetable in Europe as well.