what was the purpose of japan's attack on pearl harbor?

Question

I have seen yhe movie pearl harbor, and read about it in school, but Istill don' know the purpose of japan attacks (war). could someone tell me? [e-mail]

Answer 1

It was in retaliation of the sinking of a Japanese Submarine, off the Canadian Coast.
Ordered by the Eisenhower 2 bring US hearts & minds on board 2 join in with WW2 & fight against German World Domination.

Sorry that didn't answer UR question.
Doh!

Japan joined in with Nazi Germany as their race were suffering a lull in direction similar 2 the German people. The aim was 2 aid Nazi Germany as siding with the West wasn't an option.
Honour means everything & Hitler yanked all the right chains 4 Emperor Shōwa & his predecessor Tasio. Flattery won them over & their partnership was sealed until the U.S. Nagasaki/Hiroshima Bombs.

Answer 2

the U. S. became the only usa that became a danger to Japan's ambition of controlling the pacific. The attack on Pearl Harbor became an attempt to pre-emptively take out the U. S. army (or a minimum of weaken it). undesirable mistake.

Answer 3

Rather than try and explain, as it is very complicated, I'll begin by suggesting that you read :
"Day of Deceit-The Truth about FDR & Pearl Harbour" by
Robert B. Stinnett, Stinett served in the USN from '42-'46 & earned 10 battle stars and a Pres.Unit Citation. His chief source of info comes from Congressional records now available under " The Freedom of Information Act."
By 1941 , it was appearent that the US had to get involved in the war. In Aug. , apoll taken showed over 80% of Americans did not want to get involved.
This left FDR with 3 possibilites:
#1; The Red army would defeat the Nazies with help from Britain and her allies, leaving FDR to deal with a Communist Europe.
#2; If Britain fell, the whole of the British Commonwealth woud be compromised including Canada. Although certain ppl would have preferred this outcome, such as Henry Ford and George Bush's grand father and possibly JFK's father who was another known Nazi sympathizer, as was Charles Lindburg, FDR denied Linburg a commission in the USAF for this very reason.There were rumours that there were plans , that if England fell , hitler would restore Edward VIII to the English throne. This was a scenero that FDR did not want.
#3; If England , her allies and Russia defeated Germany, this war would leave the US on the outside looking in with no say as to the future of Europe.
Japan, although allied to Germany was busy in China ( check out "The Rape of Nanking" , also Korea. The primary source of war materials for Japan was the USA.
With the primary assisstance of Lt. Comm. Arthur McCollum, Head of the Far East Desk.Navy Intteligence in Washington They came up with an"8-step stratagy to force Japan to attack.
Obviously, the plan worked, because on Dec 8/'41 just about 100% of Americans were in favour of the war.

Answer 4

To cripple the US Navy so that it would be easier to take over the rest of the land surrounding the Pacific Ocean. After all, the goal of the Japanese Empire at the time was to expand it's territory from the Rocky Mountains to the Himalayas.

Answer 5

Simple version: violently right-wing elements in the Japanese government were responding to economic sanctions (particularly regarding the importing of oil) imposed on them by the West. The sanctions had been imposed due to this right-wing government's imperialist actions in China and southeast Asia.

Longer version: Japan was concerned with European empire-building in Asia and had been since the 1500s, and had tried isolation from about 1600 to 1858. In the latter half of the 19th century, the Japanese concluded that it would be necessary to get "up to speed" with the Western powers if they wanted to avoid being made a colony of one of the western superpowers. Within 45 years Japan had met this goal, defeating Russia in 1903.

Through the 1930s, Japanese industry thrived while two factions struggled for government in Japan. Both believed that Japan, as the most technically advanced nation in Asia at that time, had a moral obligation to protect Asia from Europe and the US. However, one believed that their technical superiority gave them the right to "protect" the rest of Asia by pre-empting the European powers and making Asia a colony of the empire of Japan rather than of England, France or the U.S.

By 1937 Japan had occupied large parts of China and was actively involved in military activities in an attempt to put the entire country under Japanese rule. It was these activities that Cordell Hull, U.S. Secretary of State from 1933-1944, sought to end diplomatically. So the U.S., among other nations, eventually brought sanctions against Japan, prohibiting the import of oil to run the machinery of Japanese industry. The Japanese countered by trying to expand their military base in southeast Asia and Indonesia, mainly in search of their own oil resources.

Now enter Isoroku Yamamoto. Injured in the Russian war in 1903, Yamamoto had risen in the Japanese military due to his samurai background and his strategic brilliance. After the first world war (in which Japan fought on the side of the US, England and France), Yamamoto was made official military attache to Washington. There's a particularly poignant photograph on the page listed for him in my Sources field, showing him laying a wreath on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington National Cemetary, c. 1927. It's poignant because Yamamoto lived in the US for many years, loved the country and the people, and yet was ordered by his emperor to draft a strategy that would assure victory in the Pacific.

So Yamamoto came up with the idea of destroying the Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor. To do this it was necessary, among other things, to develop new weapons; at the time, torpedoes launched from aircraft required at least 75 feet of water, while Pearl was only about 40 feet deep. So the Nakajima Aircraft Corporation engineered a solution to this and mounted it on their B5N carrier-based torpedo bombers. Combined with the carrier-based fighter, Mitsubishi's A6M Zero, considered by many pilots to be superior in speed and manoueverability to the Spitfires and BF-109s fighting over Britain at the time, the Japanese had clear naval air superiority at the outset of war.

The attack, of course, took place as scheduled, on Dec 8 1941 (Japanese date; we know it as Dec 7). Yamamoto had intended to cripple the US Pacific Fleet and make it impossible for the US to launch a response for some time, during which Japan's other military forces would solidify their positions in southeast Asia. However, Yamamoto knew that this would only be a temporary reprieve; he told his superiors that he could "run wild for six months," but that he could not guarantee results after that. (If nothing else he was a master of estimation; the Battle of Midway occurred roughly three days before the six-month mark, on June 4, 1942.)

The great tragic flaw in this plan -- and it's right up there with Hamlet not killing his uncle at his prayers for historical drama -- was that due to difficulties in decoding and translating the Japanese declaration of war in Washington, the actual document was not delivered to Hull until almost an hour after the attack had taken place. This changed Yamamoto's attack from what he believed was an honorable act that relied on the element of surprise, to one which he knew the Americans would find despicable.

The battle of Pearl Harbor itself was, of course, only partially successful from the standpoint of Yamamoto and the Japanese, in large part because of Admiral Nagano's decision not to engage the US carrier fleet (which was, miraculously from the US viewpoint, not bottled up with the battleships at Pearl). Because of this, the US carriers were able to regroup and, at Midway, sink all of the Japanese carriers -- the Hiryu, the Soryu, and the Akagi -- which had launched the attack on Pearl. Yamamoto himself lived only a few months longer; while on a morale-building mission through southeast Asia, his whereabouts were uncovered (due to incredibly secret operations by Allied codebreakers, who had cracked the Japanese code). A squadron of P-38 Lightning aircraft were dispatched to intercept Yamamoto's Mitsubishi G4N "Betty" bomber, and it was shot down over Bougainville on April 18, 1943 -- in a freakish historical twist, the anniversary of Paul Revere's ride through Boston informing the soldiers of the Revolution that the British were coming.

Some final comments: it is often said that Yamamoto, on learning that Kurusu and Nomura had delayed delivering the declaration of war till after the attack, uttered the now-famous line, "I fear all we have done is awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve." There is no contemporary evidence that Yamamoto actually said this, though it is most definitely indicative of Yamamoto's sense of honor as a samurai and his tragic empathy and understanding of the American people and spirit. I cannot help but feel sorry for Yamamoto, a man of great honor and intellect forced by his sense of duty and hundreds of years of samurai tradition to devise an attack against the people with whom he had lived for a decade and whom he considered friends, only to learn that he had been betrayed by the incompetence of others in his own government.

If you REALLY want to learn about the causes of WW2 in the Pacific, read "The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1936-1945," by John Toland. It's a big book but a surprisingly quick read, and lays out the details very thoroughly.

And if you'd like to see a MUCH, MUCH better movie than that piece-of-$#!+ video game they called "Pearl Harbor," rent "Tora! Tora! Tora!" sometime. Two things make this a vastly superior movie (even if it doesn't have the lovely Kate Beckinsale) -- real aircraft and a Japanese second-unit. It gives a much more even-handed view of both sides, and shows the political struggles in Tokyo and Washington as well as the military struggles at Hickam, Ford Island, and other points on Oahu.