Well, my first attempt at trying to get into history, here goes nothing.
So, one day, I was talking to my friends about World War II, and the results of it, when we stumbled upon the topic of the Pacific Ocean theater. We were discussing the losses of the US Navy versus the IJN, and my friend made a claim that there wasn't any naval battle in the second World War that the Japanese were victorious in. Is this true?
Sorry if I used some incorrect or vague terminology here and there, I don't know a lot about this topic.
Battle of the Java Sea in 1942 comes to mind. The IJN defeated a combine force of American, British, Dutch, and Australian ships. They sunk 5 ships and didn't lose any themselves.
The Pearl Harbor raid inflicted quite disproportionate losses on the U.S. navy and is hard not to describe as a victory. Another great shock was the battle of Savo island, when a Japanese cruiser force attacked an Allied invasion fleet, sinking four cruisers while taking only minor damage themselves. The notion that the Japanese navy failed to achieve any battlefield victories simply isn't true. However, their victories were almost entirely in 1941 and 1942; in 1943 and later the Allies had a nearly unbroken string of victories.