The German industry was more advanced in general, but the *degree* is routinely exaggerated, often seriously. As Parsifal said, German fighters of early 1942 could not have accomplished the missions assigned to Japanese fighters, were very seriously deficient in range. 400 mile radius? the Bf109 certainly didn't demonstrate any such practical radius, nowhere remotely near that. Relying on license built Bf109E's (which isn't so far fetched) the Japanese could not possibly have achieved the huge miiltary successes of Dec 41-thru mid 1942, successes which wounded the Western pscyche to the extent we *still* after all these decades tend to kneejerk skip ahead to 'well we got them in the end didn't we?' rather than acknowledge how large and shocking those victories were, vast territories conquered in remarkable little time. No way to do that with Bf109 as your main fighter, just too short ranged.
Just taking the question as asked in terms or real a/c not 'woulda/coulda' imaginary long range German fighters, then in 1941-1942 to perform offensive missions at any significant range, you'd have to take the Zero. The Bf109 was an excellent *defensive* fighter, as well as for combats offensive/defensive over a ground front, where both sides flew from airfields just out of artillery range of the front (like Western Front 1914-18, Eastern in WWII, Western Desert in most periods, etc). The Bf109 had a much spottier record as escort against other than such battlefield targets. Its shorcomings in protecting bombers in both BoB and over Malta were mainly a function of its very short endurance and persistence in combat at ranges where a Zero could hang around literally for hours; it wasn't that the opposing fighters had any inherent advantage, as shown by much better record in kill ratio terms when the British came back over France with *their* very short legged fighters ca. 1941-42, and in Western Desert in same period with both sides on a similar footing when it came to endurance: commanding kill ratio advantages for the Bf109 in those cases v closer ratios (though still in 109's favor when only considering fighter-fighter) in BoB and Malta.
For 1943 for the (now usually defensive) missions required for all Axis AF's it's the German fighters, and similarly for 1944 except for the new Japanese fighters introduced from then, in limited numbers, which were more comparable to German (and Western for that matter) ones, not altogether as advanced, but again not a huge difference.
But then 'the a/c industry' or 'advaned a/c' isn't the whole story anyway. The general British impression going into Pac War that Japanese fighter opposition would be far easier than German was very questionable in terms of the results; a/c like Hurricane were by then typically getting badly beaten up by German fighters in Med/North Africa, but they did no better or evenr worse v the Japanese; in a few cases that was same units which had fought both places, and it included Brit pilots who were veterans of relatively successful action v the Germans. Again the leftover propaganda kneejerk is to basically say 'OK some German fighter units were very formidable and Hurricane an obsolescent a/c by 1942' but then make all kinds of excuses for similar setbacks by Hurricanes (or later on, Spitfires) against the Japanese. IMO, it's not at all clear Japanese Navy fighter units in 1942 were any less formidable than German, in air combat considering all factors not just 'advanced industry', and the Japanese fighters could range much further from any given set of bases which made them a lot more difficult to deal with when they were on the offensive.
Joe