They were never planning to invade and take over the country…

First lord of the admiralty

It’s kinda hard to just replace 80% of your oil supply

I mean if they really took Hawaii I could see that stretching out to years because the Pacific is the biggest thing on Earth and ships only carried so much coal.

Yet for much the same reason I doubt Japan could have seriously taken and held Hawaii while doing all the other smashing and grabbing they needed to do. If they had the resources for that they wouldn’t have needed the war in the first place.

A more successful Pearl Harbor only delays the inevitable. Japan was wrong that attacking the British and Dutch would lead to war with America as there was no American appetite to declare war to protect European colonies.

I agree. It wasn't about picking a good choice, Japan just picked what they thought was the "least bad" out of a number of even worse/unacceptable options.

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The Ottoman empire's embassies were first established in the 1830s.

>the US embargoed Japan‘s access to oil meaning the Japanese Empire was mere month away from collapsing

They had the entire rest of the world from whom to purchase oil.

He was also war secretary or something similar during WW1 but he resigned after Gallipoli

Yeah, sinking carriers in their berths means that the flight crews probably survive. The U.S. would have just lost a few additional islands before building more carriers with a lot of pissed-off aviators on board.

As a non-religious example, Columbus: while someone else would have done the same eventually, it was his accidental discovery of gold in the "New World" that dramatically changed the nature of Spain's interest. In general, a slower exploration of America would be likely, shifting the fortunes of Spain at a minimum, which would in turn massively shift events in the early modern world.

Even if they had sunk all the carriers it only would have bought them a few months. U.S. naval industrial capacity was leagues ahead of what Japan could produce and they would have been outgunned sooner or later. Really the only path for a win in the pacific was for the U.S. to decide it wasn’t worth it, though even still Japan would have collapsed from resource shortages and the later Soviet invasion eventually.

It would have worked in the short term but it would have set up a reckoning had the US been forced to accept a temporary defeat.

An empire in Asia, they were not strong enough to wage war across the world.

No. Japan was creating an empire which means many attacks on many nations were to come.

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From a profile by the Oregon Historical Society:

>Matsuoka was a Japanese diplomat who played a key role in Japan’s foreign relations from the 1900s through the early 1940s. He also happened to have a strong connection to the state of Oregon.

>Matsuoka would go on to have a long, controversial diplomatic career during one of the most tumultuous periods in the history of Japanese foreign relations. He believed that Japan, like the other island empire, Great Britain, was destined to expand outward. “Both must be colonial empires,” he told one reporter, “both must be maritime and naval powers.”

>In 1930, Matsuoka was elected to the Japanese parliament. Three years later he pulled Japan out of the League of Nations while serving as his nation’s chief delegate after the League condemned Japan’s invasion of Manchuria. He went on to serve as foreign minister from 1940-1941, during which time he signed the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy.

Yosuke Matsuoka, https://www.oregonhistoryproject.org/articles/historical-records/yosuke-matsuoka/

That's not true. Japan wanted to expand control in Asia. They needed oil. USA embargoed Japan so they don't get oiĺ anymore. Japan attacked USA because of oil.

If USA backed off and let them have oil, Japan would never attack them. They would focus on Asia.

Many of the natives tried to build exactly the kind of alliance you're talking about, but practically, such a cause was always doomed: steel tools and gunpowder were simply too powerful as force multipliers to ignore, and weaker tribes saw no practical diffrence in being evicted from their land by a rival tribe instead of the Europeans.

And once a tribe takes to using gunpowder weapons and steel, it's stuck: killing all the Europeans is the same as signing one's own death warrant, because the skills needed to be independent are lost. Even if they accept that, all that changes is that the French take over instead.

You are missing a critical piece of information here - the US embargoed Japan‘s access to oil meaning the Japanese Empire was mere month away from collapsing (and while this might have been desirable the outcome would have been monstrous on everyone involved, mass starvation and likely mass looting across China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan and Vietnam (which the Japanese snatched from the French) or having to accept the American demands and withdrawing from Vietnam and China completely (which obviously would have been the right moral choice but no politician in Japan could order such a thing without serious risk of assassination). The US also stationed long range bombers in the Philippines further endangering the Japanese transports and colonies.

So, Japan saw no option but to strike at the European colonies which had oil but expected the US to then strike Japan (as the US guaranteed the colonial possessions of the Europeans). This is why they attacked Pearl Harbor- to strengthen their chances for this desperate plan.

And of course Japan should have never attacked China and start the war in Asia but they really didnt have much options. Roosevelt (who btw. never even engaged into any talks with Japan after the embargo) masterfully forced Japan to attack (although he likely anticipated Japan just attacking the European colonies) and bring the US into war where hus priority was Europe though (he always pushed for Europe over the pacific despite the Japanese attacking the US first).

It would have worked if any of the following would have happened:

1. kill/sink all U.S. Carriers (4x) in their berths, or
2. have the carrier strike group include an invasion force and take Hawaii, or
3. destroy the Fuel Depots on Hawaii, or
4. Stick around for more than 3 attack runs and kill the remaining 4 carriers while at sea.

​

As such history has been written and one only speaks Japanese in the U.S. for fun.

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Germany and the Soviet Union had a deal too, until they didn’t. Even if a treat or peace happened, Japan would have attacked.

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