I believe Neal Stephenson put it best in
Cryptonomicon, as Admiral Yamamoto ruminates on his nation's fortunes while riding aboard a Betty on the way to a fateful meeting with some P-38's:
Tojo and his claque of Imperial Army boneheads said to him, in effect: Why don't you go out and secure the Pacific Ocean for us, because we'll need a convenient shipping lane, say, oh, about ten thousand miles wide, in order to carry out our little plan to conquer South America, Alaska, and all of North America west of the Rockies. In the meantime we'll finish mopping up China. Please attend to this ASAP.
By then they were running the country. They had assassinated anyone in their way, they had the emperor's ear, and it was hard to tell them that their plan was full of shit and that the Americans were just going to get really pissed off and annihilate them. So, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, a dutiful servant of the emperor, put a bit of thought into the problem, sketched out a little plan, sent out one or two boats on a small jaunt halfway across the fucking planet, and blew Pearl Harbor off the map. He timed it perfectly, right after the formal declaration of war. It was not half bad. He did his job.
One of his aides later crawled into his office--in the nauseatingly craven posture that minions adopt when they are about to make you really, really unhappy--and told him that there had been a mix-up in the embassy in Washington and that the diplomats there had not gotten around to delivering the declaration of war until well after the American Pacific Fleet had gone to the bottom.
To those Army fuckheads, this is nothing--just a typo, happens all the time. Isoroku Yamamoto has given up on trying to make them understand that the Americans are grudge-holders on a level that is inconceivable to the Nipponese, who learn to swallow their pride before they learn to swallow solid food. Even if he could get Tojo and his mob of shabby, ignorant thugs to comprehend how pissed off the Americans are, they'd laugh it off. What're they going to do about it? Throw a pie in your face, like the Three Stooges? Ha, ha, ha! Pass the sake and bring me another comfort girl!
