Agree on all counts. The Japanese believed that they were racially superior (and btw, still do)to westerners and even their fellow Asians. Thereby, they held a deep resentment that white westerners were the colonial masters of large chunks of Asia which they considered their right to rule. Also, being that they (Japanese) did have aspirations to have hegemony over the Pacific and all the land associated with that region, including much of China they needed large quantities of natural resources such as iron and oil. When the U.S. embargoed them from access to these resources they had to look elsewhere, such as to SEA, Australia and China. However, they (Japanese) knew that inorder to conquer these countries and to rule the Pacific it would have to take out the U.S. Pacific fleet. Hence, the attack on Pearl Harbor and the following coordinated attacks on strategic countries along the Pacific rim. Btw, initially, the citizens of these various countries perceived the Japanese not as conquerors but as welcome hero's who had arrived to free them from the “white man's yoke”. Sadly, they soon learned that enslavement is enslavement regardless of the color of one’s master - and the Japanese were very harsh masters indeed...
If the Japanese still see themselves as superior to everyone else, why do they seem not to express it as in the past and why the seeming ‘’worship’’ of sorts of things (and sometimes people of American descent) American?