Prelude to the attack on Pearl Harbor

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Before the attack on Pearl Harbor, war between the Empire of Japan and the United States was a possibility each nation's military forces had planned for after World War I. The expansion of American territories in the Pacific had been a threat to Japan since the 1890s, but real tensions did not begin until the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931. Japan's fear of being colonized and the government's expansionist policies led to its own imperialism in Asia and the Pacific, as it sought to join the great powers, all of which were Western nations. The Japanese government saw it necessary to become a colonial power in order to be modern and therefore Western. In the 1930s, Japan expanded slowly into China, which led to the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937. In 1940, Japan invaded French Indochina in an effort to embargo all imports into China, including war supplies that were purchased from the U.S. That move prompted the U.S. to embargo all oil exports, which led the Imperial Japanese Navy...

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