The Russo-Japanese War played a part, but I suspect that a rarely discussed factor is the warpage caused by Washington Naval Treaty. I won't call the "Fleet Faction" unrealistic - they knew well enough they can't really get parity, so they were trying for 70%, which as I understand it is actually defensible by then contemporary naval theory as the approximate minimum mark they need to win.
The 70% is roughly adequate for (according to then naval theory):
1) Mutual annihilation with the Americans, should it gather up its entire force and move across the Pacific, since they are expected to lose 30% combat power while swimming over.
2) The defeat of the American Navy, should it commit its Pacific Fleet first, then the Atlantic in-turn.
3) The defeat of a theoretical British/American allied force if the issue is such that they'd only commit their Pacific Fleets.
Overall, these aren't extremely unreasonable goals or "excessive sufficiency."
The Americans and Brits crow about their "Two ocean theory" but let's fact it, the Brits are only defending their colonies and America is more or less self-sufficient even without oceanic trade at that time, so their justification is, in objective terms, much weaker than Japan's whose trade relates to the very survival of their core nation. There's also the fact that American and British national power is in the long run much stronger and so the Japanese will have to think really hard before getting too cocky, even if they did get an edge in the Pacific.
The Fleet Faction even read America properly that they would be reasonable and concede to 70%. Well, that is, until the moronic Japanese Foreign Ministry decided to send messages suggesting that 60% would be acceptable to the Japanese government. The Americans decoded the message and failed to consider the real consequences of forcing a treaty that's just below what they needed. The fact the decoding tends to be dominant factor in American accounts would suggest that really, the 60% was a nice to have rather than a critical necessity as far as the Americans are concerned.
Because of the idiocy of the Japanese Treaty Faction (yes, the idea of some kind of treaty is definitely a good one for Japan, but the Fleet Faction actually read America's limits better that time) and America's "Take When You Can" policy, the rest of Japanese naval construction and tactics throughout the 20s and 30s are a desperate attempt to make up for that "missing" 10%. You can tell how a navy feels about its position by how overloaded its ships are :-)
In a sense, it may actually have been better for the Japanese Navy had a deal where they are limited to say 30 or 40% of the American Navy was shoved down their throats. With the gap so great, the goal to beat the American Navy (on a tactical level) would be completely off the table, and a different development can take place. It also gives them a firmer ground to demand decisively different terms for the next treaty.
It didn't help when in the next Treaty, the Americans and Brits came up with the brilliant tactic of banning the "Special Type" destroyers, which really are a defensive measure. Sigh...
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