For the Japanese you might say "Midway was an island too far", like Arnhem. It was beyond the parameter they were establishing, and was prompted by Doolittle's raid and their ceaseless attempts to engage the US Navy in a "decisive battle". It resulted in something like temporary parity in naval power (i.e. carriers), and due to institutional failures they never recovered from their losses in trained pilots, Midway, before, and after (e.g. they didn't rotate experienced airmen back home to train new ones, they for the most part fought until they died).
Our landing in Guadalcanal and their failure to quickly snuff it is where they lost the initiative, that attacked and started to unravel their real parameter. Otherwise we'd have stayed on the defensive until enough new carriers and supporting ships and planes were built, then we would have done a much bloodier and somewhat more prolonged sole advance through the Central Pacific, which would no doubt have had even more adverse consequences.
Instead, they and we got into a knife fight in the Southwest Pacific, the Solomons and New Guinea, where both our carrier forces were essentially used up (of our serious fleet carriers only the Enterprise and Saratoga survived, and during this campaign the Saratoga got torpedoed and had to retire for a while for repairs, the Enterprise required serious stateside maintenance and refit while a British carrier covered for her).
Japan and the Allies were pretty evenly matched on paper, and this campaign was brutal in every way, we lost 40+ ships (and two Real Admirals (2 stars) in one night action), they lost 50+, and a slow war of attrition was waged in the skies. I'm reading Fire in the Sky (http://www.amazon.com/Fire-In-The-Sky-Pacific/dp/0813338697/) right now, which covers that in immense detail, e.g. one of the many reasons the Japanese lost was subpar civil engineering (in general their non-combat specialties didn't get any respect, this critically included intelligence), they didn't keep the taxiways between revetments and runways free of soft spots, resulting in lots of operational losses at critical time (on both sides, this operational losses destroyed more planes than combat)).
Industrially and institutionally they couldn't complete well, and when our 2nd generation of planes and ships came on-line, with adequately trained air crews, maintenance staff, the Japanese in comparison were "used up", and were never a serious threat in the air until they resorted to kamikaze attacks.
