Here's the setup. On November 1, 1941, Tojo shuffles off this mortal coil and you’re now in his hot seat. The plans for an attack on the western Allies are well in train. You have the advantage of hindsight so you know that the path you’re on will destroy Japanese military power.
Let’s assume that victory in your eyes is to maximize Japanese military power and that you have considerable powers to tweak Japanese decision-making, though no more than Tojo did. You are under the same economic and political constraints that he was. Your Japan will run out of oil in less than a year unless the oil embargo ends. It will run out of money to buy that oil sometime in 1942 if the embargo is lifted. You are under political constraints that prevent too much in the way of concessions to China.
Time is not on your side. Japan is temporarily militarily powerful because the US is occupied in the Atlantic, because Japan cheated on the naval limitation treaties, and because the US doesn’t have its army trained or equipped yet. The Soviets are occupied fighting the Germans, which frees up a large number of Japanese divisions that would otherwise have been tied up in Manchuria. None of that will last, with the possible exception of the Soviets being tied up and you know it.
If Japan goes through with its attack on the western Allies, it frees up the tough, well-equipped Soviet divisions that led the Soviet counter-offensive that historically pushed the Germans back from Moscow in December 1941. A Soviet victory over the Germans eventually would put Japan in an untenable position militarily.
You can’t postpone the Japanese offensive by an arbitrary number of days or weeks without consequences. For example, postponing the attack on Pearl Harbor by a month would mean crossing the north Pacific in late December/early January, which would be problematic. Pushing the offensive against Malaysia back a month or two would risk pushing the offensive into the monsoon season, which would make it much more difficult.
The US buildup in the Philippines is also a constraint. When the historic Japanese attack happened, the US was frantically building up fighter airpower in the Philippines, as well as bringing in B17s. They were also bringing in additional ground forces, including a substantial contingent in the “Pensacola convoy” which was actually on its way to the Philippines when war broke out. They were also training and equipping a much-expanded Filipino army. Historically, the Filipino forces were easy meat for the Japanese. Given more training and better weapons that might not be true. Wait too long and the Philippines would become a tougher nut to crack.
The attack can’t be pushed forward much either without consequences. The Pearl Harbor attack required special military ordinance like special torpedoes and special armor-piercing bombs that were barely ready in time for the historic attack. Actually, in the case of the special armor-piercing bombs (actually modified naval artillery shells), Japanese industry wasn't able to produce as many as the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor could really have used and the Japanese actually ran out of those bombs by the end of their attacks.
Japan is dependent on imported raw materials. As soon as you declare war you are short of merchant ships to supply the Home Islands, even if you can capture sources of raw material because the Japanese merchant marine is too small to supply the islands, and a considerable percentage (25% from old and possibly faulty memory) of the tonnage coming into the home islands is on foreign flagged ships. Shipping will become even more of a bottleneck in the war, because every new foothold your army takes is one more drain on scarce cargo shipping. You don’t have enough tankers to ship enough oil to the home islands, even if you can take enough oil wells.
Speaking of oil, if you’ve done your homework you know that Japanese estimates of their oil requirements during the war are way too low. You’ll run out of oil if you don’t go to war. You’ll run out of oil if you do.
A couple of the most common Japanese if-only's probably wouldn't work. Careful studies of the time-line on the day of the Pearl Harbor attack seem to indicate that a Japanese third-strike on December 7 wouldn't have worked. There weren't enough hours before it got dark. Night-time carrier landings in early World War II were doable but very dangerous, especially with damaged planes. Also, enough Japanese planes had sustained minor damage that made them unflyable for later that day that a third wave would have been far weaker than the first two.
A Japanese invasion of Hawaii immediately after Pearl Harbor is also a non-starter, for a long list of reason, including problems fueling the ships for a landing force, coordinating that force with the aircraft carriers, the fact that the Japanese navy didn't have enough fuel to stick around and support that attack beyond maybe December 8, and the fact that no Japanese commander could be sure that the Pearl Harbor of their world would be as helpless after the attack as ours was. As soon as you change Japanese plans in a substantive way it starts having an impact on what exactly would happen at Pearl Harbor. A couple of divisions of Japanese soldiers sitting in slow transports off a Pearl Harbor where the US battleships were mostly at sea or on the alert when the Japanese attack came would be a recipe for a Japanese disaster.
Low-Hanging Fruit: You can know a few useful things: (1) Not to fritter away the Japanese advantage in carrier numbers in the lead-up to Midway. (2)That you need to expand the Japanese pilot training program to replace their wartime losses. That’ll take a maybe two years to pay off, but it will make a huge difference when it does pay off. (3) Protecting and optimizing the use of the merchant marine is key to keeping Japan in the war. (4) Expanding the Japanese defensive perimeter deeper into the Pacific is counterproductive because you’ve got to supply these guys and once the US builds up a big enough fleet of carriers, land-based air power on the islands can be suppressed and the Japanese forces on most islands can be bypassed to wither away for lack of food and ammunition.
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