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You may or may not be surprised to know that there was no small number of high-ranking Japanese officers who were telling Yamamoto this very same thing when he first brought up the idea in January 1941.

I don’t doubt it. I think Yamamoto was under duress to make the decision, and wrote disparagingly about it. But he did as he was ordered. The army leaders were calling the shots. I read (somewhere, can’t find a peep about it right now) that a military plan to assassinate him was narrowly averted by a promotion. Oh, there is almost a reference to this on the wiki-wacky page. The assassination worry was in 1939, IOW a couple years before Pearl Harbor.

12/06/2021 - "Misremembering Pearl Harbor" by VIctor Daavis Haonson

The Yamamoto Myth

Admiral Yamamoto, the architect of Pearl Harbor, is often romantically portrayed as a mythical almost reluctant warrior who supposedly all along knew that he would awaken a sleeping giant by the attack. Thus, he accepted the reality that he could only run wild for six months before he was overwhelmed by American industry, technology, and righteous furor. In this historically incomplete view, the taciturn Yamamoto was a tragic hero ordered to find some impossible strategy of defeating a much larger and stronger United States.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Yamamoto himself agitated for the surprise Pearl Harbor attack. And he even threatened to resign if a skeptical General Tojo and Emperor Hirohito did not grant him a blank check to bomb the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Hawaii, a diversion of resources many in the Japanese military felt was unjustified, especially with the ongoing and increasingly expensive quagmire in China.

I'm with VDH on this.

From everything I've read, it's clear that Yamamoto felt that the only chance Japan had of preventing US interference in their plans for the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere was to put the US in a position where a negotiated settlement would be preferable to combat, and that the best means to do this would be to inflict a surprise strike in the hopes of crippling the US Pacific Fleet.

Most of those in his circle were telling him that his idea was lunacy; unfortunately, they couldn't propose a better option for engaging the US if the US decided to take on Japan.