History Japan’s plans to invade and occupy Hawaii

Japan's greatest strategic mistakes of World War II were its sneak attack on Pearl Harbor and failure to follow up that attack with destruction of the Pacific Fleet's oil supplies, submarine base, shipyard, and drydocks. But was its failure to invade Hawaii a third strategic blunder? And could it have successfully carried out such an invasion? The conventional narrative on the Pacific War has it that Japan never intended to invade Hawaii. This view asserts that the Japanese leadership felt Hawaii was too difficult to capture and retain and that it was, in any case, outside the desired limits of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. However, we now know that Hawaii was in fact explicitly included within the Sphere in both public and classified wartime documents. Indeed, the below map of Hawaii, created in 1943, explicitly shows that Hawaii had been envisioned in the Sphere.

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In 1889, Japan prepared a secret 100-year plan to take over "American and British possessions in the Pacific, including Hawaii." Japanese activist Keishiro Inoue "urged throughout the 1890s that Japan must rule Hawaii in order to protect itself in the Pacific."

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