The Japanese leadership had come to the conclusion that they needed national self-sufficiency for their growing military aspirations.
They didn’t have the oil and other natural resources in their own territories to make this a reality.
They had two choices: Take it from Russia in the form of Siberian resources, or take it from Western colonies in SE Asia. The first required a lot more Army units than they had. So, they went with taking them from SE Asian colonies.
The Japanese understood that they could not win a prolonged war with America. Their solution was to destroy America’s offensive ability in the Pacific theater and remove Americas will to fight so that they would sue for peace.
General Yamamoto stated, “In the first six months to a year of war against the U.S. and England I will run wild, and I will show you an uninterrupted succession of victories; I must also tell you that, should the war be prolonged for two or three years, I have no confidence in our ultimate victory.”
Japan’s sole strategy involved dealing maximum losses to the United States at the outset, making the prospects of a prolonged war as grim as possible, and counting, in an extremely vague and ill- defined way, on the American people’s “softness” to end the war.
They hoped to make a Pacific War look so imposing and costly that the US government would allow them to make peace and keep their new resources.
The Japanese did not count on the US citizenry taking such great offense at being sucker-punched like that.
The US populace went from isolationists to full-blown ‘fuck those guys’ overnight. Massive amounts of men who’d only a few days before were against ANY involvement in the war were now lining up to sign up for the military, and 99% of it was because of Pearl Harbor.
