Japan was capable of launching a surprise attack that damaged much of the US Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor. Why did they not seize the initiative and their sudden naval superiority and try to seize the part of the US most vulnerable to naval attack, and at the same time deny the US its strongest foothold in the Pacific?
John Parshall, one of the authors of Shattered Sword (one of the major texts on the Battle of Midway), published an article on his website . The long and the short of it is that Japan simply did not have the shipping resources to take the islands, despite the strategic benefit they would have accrued. The American garrison was much too large for the Japanese amphibious forces to actually take the islands. The amount of Japanese shipping needed to crack Hawaii would have taxed Japanese resources. While the IJA as willing to part with forces for the southern drive, they would not have sanctioned such a major diversion. Japanese shipping in December 1941 barely had enough hulls to cover the invasions in East Asia and provide for the Home Islands. Attacking Hawaii would have meant abandoning any drive on the SE Asia for the foreseeable future, which was the whole rationale for the Japanese air raid in the first place: to prevent the US fleet from interfering in Japan's Southern drive.
There are two scenarios here: 1) The Japanese try to invade Hawaii in 1941 - the Kido Butai sticks around after December 7th to support an invasionĀ 2) The Japanese actually manage to take Midway in mid 1942 and then try to invade Hawaii.
The latter option is probably the most "feasible" one. In December 1941, the Army and Navy were too preoccupied with upcoming operations in Malaya, the Philippines, China, and elsewhere to seriously contemplate invading Hawaii immediately after the Pearl Harbor raid.
To add on to what u/kieslowskifan has written, let's talk a little bit more about Hawaii's defenses in late 1941 and early 1942.
An immediate invasion of Hawaii in December 1941 would have been immediately counter-attacked by air and by sea.
Before Japan could have attempted any amphibious assault against Hawaii, it would have had to achieve naval superiority. In December 1941, there were three carriers (Saratoga, Lexington, and Enterprise) and the surviving cruisers of the Pacific Fleet would have been ready to defend Hawaii within days or weeks of December 7th. Three more carriers (Yorktown, Wasp, and Ranger), three to six battleships, and additional cruisers from the Atlantic Fleet could also have been rushed to Hawaii. [http://www.navsource.org/Naval/usf01.htm]
Indeed, after the actual Pearl Harbor attack, the Navy immediately transfered three battleships and an aircraft carrier from the Atlantic Fleet to the Pacific.
The Army was likewise beefing up the islands' defenses, according to the official history:
by 12 December the Army position was "to take all possible steps short of jeopardizing the security of the Continental United States and the Panama Canal to reinforce the defenses of Oahu."
Although two or three American carriers facing the six carriers of the Kido Butai might not sound like long odds - the Americans had a lot going for them. With Hawaii as an unsinkable aircraft carrier, the American carrier air groups would have been backed by the Hawaiian Air Force and the island's Navy and Marine Corps aircraft. Within two weeks of the invasion, the Army had 42 B-17s on the islands and had rushed 100 pursuit aircraft to Hawaii. Eighteen of the Flying Forts were on 30-minute standby as a striking force, while the rest were being used as search aircraft.
What acutally happened at Midway is instructive here. Although land-based USAAF, Navy, and Marine Corps aircraft did relatively little damage in the opening phase of the battle, they considerably disrupted Japanese carrier operations. Forced to constantly launch and recover Zeroes for Combat Air Patrol (CAP), Nagumo never had the chance to launch an effective second strike against Midway.
Even more importantly, land-based Catalina scout aircraft were able to locate the Japanese fleet at Midway. This early sighting helped the Americans make increasingly effective air attacks as the day went on. Meanwhile, the Japanese were forced to depend on a handful of cruiser-launched scout planes to do their scouting - as a result, it took far longer dor the Japanese to locate and attack the American carriers.
The same would have been true in a hypothetical defense of Hawaii. The Army's official history describes how the Americans launched patrols after Pearl Harbor:
[aircraft searched] 700 nautical miles in all directions. To make this patrol possible the Navy transferred three squadrons of reconnaissance craft from the Atlantic as quickly as it could ... 37 [aircraft] were normally used-12 B-17's and 25 Navy PBY's.
Admittedly, the effort wasn't perfect.
The reconnaissance, though far superior to anything attempted before Pearl Harbor, was admittedly a good deal less than perfect- low visibility in the patrolled lanes could cut its effectiveness to near zero, and about one-fifth of the circle surrounding the islands had to be left virtually unpatrolled each day.
However, the Americans would still have bern much better off. Japanese carriers would probably have been in the dark about the location of the American task forces. meanwhile. American carriers would have likely known the location (or at least the general vicinity) of the Japanese carriers - allowing them to get off the first strike. Given that carriers are fragile and vulnerable, getting off the first attack was a huge advantage. Remember, just three dive bomber squadrons from two carriers destroyed three Japanese carriers at Midway in just a few minutes.
Had the the Japanese carriers lingered to support an amphibious assault after December 7th, the Americans might have pulled off a Midway six months early. The Japanese knew their carriers were vulnerable to a counterstroke after December 7th, which is why they didn't even stick around to deliver a second strike on the 7th or 8th. Risking six irreplaceable carriers on a sustained amphibious operation right under the nose of the USN and USAAC was a suicidal proposition and the Japanese knew this.
But what about a later strike? What if the Japanese had won at Midway and wiped out the carriers? The Army's official history notes that Hawaii was stiffly-defended by mid-1942:
The garrison of the Hawaiian Department ... was to consist of 74,000 ground troops on Oahu, 13,000 on Hawaii, and 12,800 distributed among five other islands. With small additions during March, the authorized strength of the department became at the beginning of April [1942] 106,000 ground and 16,000 air troops, including replacements for all soldiers of Japanese descent; and the department reached these strengths before the end of June 1942.
The Army air units to be retained in the islands for local defense were to contain 96 heavy and 24 medium and light bombers and 225 pursuit planes, and the Navy was obligated to keep 67 patrol planes on hand for long-range and local reconnaissance.
The soldiers and Marines on the islands were manning a natural fortress that had already been fortified before the war. Since then, they'd made it even stronger:
In September 1939, the Army commander in Hawaii, Maj. Gen. Charles D. Herron, after "taking stock" of his local outlook, informally commented to General Marshall that he would not "want to be given the job of cracking the nut" which Oahu presented to any would-be invader, because of its "encircling reefs and two coasts protected by very difficult small mountain ranges and the south shore very heavily armed [and therefore with the] prospect of fighting an entrenched division all the way across after a landing on the north shore."
Not without justification, the War Plans Division had stated before the war that:
"The Island of Oahu, due to its fortification, its garrison, and its physical characteristics, is believed to be the strongest fortress in the world."
"But what about Singapore?" I hear you say. "Wasn't that also the strongest fortress in the world?"
Parshall's article goes into the differences between Oahu and Singapore in his article, so I won't stress the point here. Suffice to say, the Americans on Oahu in 1941 were much better off than the British in Singapore. They would have been angry Americans fighting foreign invaders on American soil. They'd have had more air support, more naval support, and the chance to be resupplied. And they Japanese wouldn't have been able to pull off the flanking moves they'd made in Malaya - they'd have had to make bloody frontal assaults against line after line of American defenses.
Sources:
"Invasion: Pearl Harbor" by Jon Parshall - http://www.combinedfleet.com/pearlops.htm
Guarding the United States and its Outposts by Stetson Conn, Rose C. Engelman, and Byron Fairchild - https://history.army.mil/books/wwii/Guard-US/ch6.htm andĀ https://history.army.mil/books/wwii/Guard-US/ch8.htm