[Stealhead]

At the start of the war the Japanese knew exactly what they needed to do the territories they needed to gain so on and so forth so they had been planning this action for several years.

Then take into account that they where obviously observing what they could about each possible enemy in Asia its military capabilities in the region and they also had to know the general prejudices towards them many truly believed that Japanese where near sighted and that their bodies where not capable handling advanced maneuvers in an aircraft there was a huge and foolish belief that the Japanese where inferior from a military standpoint and that was a very foolish and costly mistake and it always is such a thing to underestimate your enemy or potential enemy.I guess Japan just felt very confident at the start of the war and some high ranking leaders never lost that feeling.

The Japanese where very keen observers of other nations military success they where very impressed with the Royal Navy raid on the Italian Naval base in Taranto.And they also changed their tactics as the war progressed they learned to build complex very well inter connected defenses rather than the earlier war tactics that they had on Guadalcanal. A very good book that can give you a great impression of their later war tactics is "With the Old Breed" by E.B. Sledge himself a US Marine.

As to the Japanese failure to deal with sets backs who knows but I believe it can partly be blamed on the bitter rivalry between the IJA and the IJN.One could not look weak in front of the other needless to say they had a lot of problems and not very many real solutions beyond by the later part of the war making each gain of land by the US so costly that eventually a peace treaty seem a better option and this was not overly unrealistic though it did not work out that way in the end.