JFK Situation Room in White House 1962, notice back wall.

This map is why Hawaii and Midway Island were so important in WW2. To get to the South Pacific, you had to go by Japan. Midway bumpered you around that. That's why the Japanese were so very keen to knock out the facilities at Hawaii and remove Midway island as a refueling stop. No ship or plane, in those days, could go angling out and around to get around Japan to start island hopping in the South Pacific. Had the Japanese accomplished their goals in 1942, the war in the Pacific would have been very much different and Australia would have been cut off from the Anglo west. This also reveals the big WHY NOT go straight at Japan?
WHY? Because the the Japanese were steam rolling over island after island chain in the Pacific and nothing was stopping them. Yamamoto knew that to stop the Americans, he had to take Midway. It's why he committed all his naval forces on the one gamble of knocking it out for good. And lost that gamble. Japan paid for that loss, as the US had its refueling mid point AROUND Japan during the whole war.
We live on a Flat Earth