US worries were legitimate (atrocities perpetrated against civilians, future control of Europe/Asia, the international economic order and security of global trade networks, etc.) but “urgent” invasion wasn’t one of them.
It wasn’t a very successful invasion. They held a couple of islands for two months at the cost of 4000 of their 8000 men.
Disclaimer: I am not an expert in contemporary American understanding of WWII.
Edit because I’m exhausted and not being mindful about finishing thoughts, I didn’t mean this to be fighting words so much as clarifying words: they cared about mass attacks on civilians in some cases but not others. Bombings of allied cities was absolutely a concern. Mass murder or German and mostly eastern European Jews wasn’t such a concern. There wasn’t any such reaction to sending Jewish refugees back to be murdered.
The whole concept of actually caring about nazi atrocities on the scale they they committed them, to the victims they were committed against, was a retroactive set of moral concerns. And that’s unsurprising given that the US was the primary inspiration for those atrocities.
The Philippines was US.
We were literally invaded.
They also bombed the West Coast.
The mainland US was not in any danger.
What I mean by this is that the average US citizen was completely safe (well, until drafts)
Two bombs, and it was basically a non-event. The intent was to start massive forest fires, but they failed.
They also shelled the West coast, and all they did was damage a baseball backstop at Fort Stevens and tear up the beach a bit.
You are right that the Philippines was invaded, and was at the time a US territory. But it was at that point under a government intended to transition it to independence. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hare–Hawes–Cutting_Act
From what I can tell (this was decades before my birth and I have not extensively studied it, so I probably have an oversimplified impression) for mainland Americans, the Philippines was not really considered to be part of the country in the same way as, say, Illinois or Texas, and Filipinos were not considered to be Americans in the same way. (e.g. after WWII the Congress voted to strip benefits from Filipino veterans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rescission_Act_of_1946) I’m sure the US wanted to maintain some navy and trade presence there though.
The Japanese also occupied the Aleutian islands of Kiska and Attu (part of Alaska territory). But it’s hard to imagine that people 3000 miles away in, say, Oregon were worried that the Japanese would be imminently launching an amphibious assault from there.
(a) This balloon bombing was covered up and essentially nobody about it at the time, so clearly not something people were urgently worried about.
(b) This militarily irrelevant bombing of a handful of random civilians is hardly an “invasion”.
I presume the famous American educashun kicked in and geographically spoiled the slogan of bad bad America.