Gee, four submarines capable of launching a dozen kamikazes at the Panama Canal was a serious threat to the United States and would have won the war for Japan? Be serious.
Japan was on it's last legs. It had run out of raw materials, oil, and the capacity to suppply or eveacuate the remnants of it's army scattered across the Pacific and Asian landmass.
Funny, but the original argument began between dsc and I on the efficacy of strategic bombing, that you have chimed in and completely missed the irony: The real damage to Japan was done at SEA: without a navy to defend the home islands, to protect merchant shipping, no hulls to bring raw materials home or to transport forces across vast distances, the Japanese were sitting ducks in an age of mobile warfare. Strategic bombing did very little to defeat the Japanese (except continue to kill mostly civilians until the end of the war) since they had already lost that war at sea.
As to whether or not strategic bombing has ever worked, I found it fascinating yesterday when the Military Channel showed a documentary (Wings over the World) that dealt specifically with this argument. Did you know that Hamburg was bombed 170 times during the war? Berlin itself over 200?
We can assume (I can prolly dig the exact figures out given time) that the vast majority of German cities were similarly visited at least 50 times, too? Either strategic bombing in the 1940's had an extremely poor return on investment, required far more time than the span afforded by 1940-45, or was an outright fallacy in terms of an effective strategy, and merely an excuse to engage in terror.
One of the major problems with strategic bombing was that the allies consistently confused the results of a raid (i.e. sheer size of an area leveled or destroyed) with the effect (i.e. amount of real damage done to actual German war production). Some people are still maming that mistake, it seems.