We cut off Japanese oil because of China. They were pretty desparate for oil, and they could obtain it in SE Asia, Borneo, Indonesia, etc. However, the PI were astride the shipping lanes from there to Japan, so they felt PI had to be neutralized. The initial plan was to invade the PI only and wait for the US response and sink our fleet mixPacific somewhere. Yamamoto came up with a new plan which was adopted, which was a tactical success and huge strategic failure as they missed the carriers and many of the sunk BBs were refloated and repaired, which could not have happened in deep waters.
What is fascinating to me is how short the window was during which war with not only the US but also Britain, their empire, and the Netherlands seemed like a logical idea for the Japanese.
First, you have to understand that while many Japanese were fanatical and most of them believed strongly in Japanese racial superiority, they weren't altogether stupid. They knew that the US alone had a VASTLY larger industrial capacity so they understood that if the US stuck to the war they (the Japanese) would eventually face fleets far larger than they could possibly hope to build and thus hopeless odds.
Knowing this, they saw war as a logical idea anyway basically because of their experience in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904/5 and in WWI.
In the Russo-Japanese War the Japanese also faced a country with a larger industrial base and a larger fleet but much like the US in the 1940's, Imperial Russia in 1904 had multiple naval commitments (The Baltic, the Black Sea, the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, the Pacific). The Japanese prevailed over the Czar because the Czar had other problems while Japan could focus exclusively in the Pacific and also because Imperial Russia in the early twentieth century was teetering dangerously close to collapse.
In WWI the Japanese basically just picked the right side. They joined the war on the allied side, nabbed a bunch of German and Austrian Pacific colonies while the Germans and Austrians were preoccupied and unable to do anything about it, then waited for the end of the war and viola, they got a bunch of stuff for not much engagement in the actual fighting of the war.
So the background is that history, their belief in Japanese racial superiority, and their belief that the Americans were fat playboys unwilling to do any real fighting. Then, from the German blitzkrieg over France up until the Germans were turned back at the gates of Moscow it looked to a lot of observers like the Germans would win the European war.
The Pearl Harbor Raid or "Hawaii Operation" as the Japanese called it, utilized six large fleet carriers. The last two of them to be built were the Shokaku Class Carriers Shokaku and Zuikaku where were commissioned on August 8, 1941 and September 25, 1941 respectively. As it turned out the American defenses in Hawaii were so grossly deficient that the Japanese probably could have been successful with just the four older carriers but the Japanese didn't know that in advance. Their prewar analysis would have indicated that they needed the six carriers because otherwise they'd have faced the possibility of being outnumbered by the American carrier planes to say nothing of land based American air power. Thus, the operation wasn't believed to be feasible until these two carriers were commissioned and ready for battle. I don't know exactly when Zuikaku was "ready for battle" but frankly it is awfully impressive that a ship commissioned on 9/25/41 was involved in a major combat operation barely two months later so it can't have been much before the actual raid.
Meanwhile, the Soviet Counter-Offensive outside Moscow began on December 5, 1941 just two days before the Pearl Harbor raid. That timing is NOT coincidental as Stalin's spy in Tokyo had notified the Kremlin that the Japanese would be attacking the US and other Western Powers in the Pacific rather than joining Germany's war against the Soviet Union and this information permitted the transfer of more than 18 divisions from Siberia and the Far East to the war against Germany.
Just a month later the Soviets had pushed the Germans back from the gates of Moscow and established a more defensible line. If the Hawaii Operation had been delayed by a month it is possible (maybe not likely) that cooler heads may have prevailed in Japan. Somebody in Japan might have looked at the situation in Europe and said "hey, Germany might not win this thing, we might be wise not to get into it on their side."
