Pearl Harbor Dbq

Why did Japan choose to attack Pearl Harbor as their declaration of war with the US?

Takeo argues that the Japanese plan for war with the United States by attacking Pearl Harbor would have “achieve[d] initial battlefield success” but ignored the “absence of rationality in selecting a course of national policy that [. . .] had no prospect for achieving final victory” (61). In other words, Takeo states that while starting a war with the United States would come with initial success, any ultimate success were not to be expected by the Japanese. If Japan was going to ultimately fail, why go into the war in the first place? This question identifies what was ‘weird’ in the Japanese decision-making at the time.

There are two major schools of thought about the Japanese plan for war with the United States and the attack on Pearl Harbor: 1) War between the two nations was inevitable, so the Japanese might have as well hit first and hit quickly and 2) neither side wanted war with each other, but the Chinese-Japanese conflict and the U.S.-Japanese crisis was interconnected in a way that war with one meant war with the other. Scholars such as Iriye, Nomura, and Kahn argue for the first school of thought. These authors argue that war between Japan and the United States was inevitable

for a variety of different reasons. What unites this school of thought is that a war between the two nations was inevitable, so the best Japanese strategy was to hit first and hit quickly. Therefore, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was a rational strategy.
Scholars such as Usui, Heinrichs, and Utley argue for the second school of thought. While the authors differ on how and why the United States was inextricably linked to China in the Japanese or American perspective, they agree that this link gave way to war. Due to this linkage, Japan’s war with China meant that there would be war with the United States. Therefore, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was flawed because the decision was based on Japan’s linking of China and the United States together.
I argue that these schools of thought leave out the reference point in which the Japanese were making their decisions and the obstruction of short-term loss aversion on good decision-making. The Japanese Liaison and Imperial Conferences did not pursue their ultimate goal, as Levi and Whyte’s thesis states, of the Greater Co-Prosperity Sphere in their decision to bomb Pearl Harbor. While Levi and Whyte argue that the Japanese reference point during the late 1930’s and early 1940’s was the Greater Co-Prosperity Sphere, I add that Japanese decision maker’s aversion to loss drove them to make an irrational decision in bombing Pearl Harbor. The decision to bomb Pearl Harbor was irrational in that it did not maximize the survival of the Greater Co-Prosperity Sphere. The decision could have been improved by considering the short-term losses in relative terms of the long-term gains. The decision makers did not recognize their plan’s flaw because they did not want to make the military efforts in China a sunk cost.
To prove that the Japanese decision makers were avoiding losses to their Greater Co-Prosperity Sphere, rather than only thinking that war between Japan and the United States was inevitable or that war with the US was a war over China, I will use both theoretical and empirical evidence.

First, I will explain how the Greater Co-Prosperity Sphere is the underlying principle of both schools of thought. Second, I will use Ike’s translated records of the 1941 Japanese Imperial and Liaison Conferences to demonstrate that the decision-makers’ reference point—the Greater Co-Prosperity Sphere—was discussed in more of the Conferences than either the inevitability of war or China, from an empirical

standpoint.
Questions–Does my logic make sense? Should I concentrate on either the reference point, the aversion to loss, or both? Am I being specific enough in what I found ‘weird’ in the DMing?