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It is a little more complicated than that. That's why I recommend you read more than one book.
For the most part, the Japanese were not stupid or delusional. In 1941, they were still trying to find a way out of war with the US, because basically every sensible person in the government and the military knew that they could not win, certainly not a prolonged war.
The problems they faced were twofold: (1) a commitment to building a colonial empire; (2) fanatics in the lower ranks.
(1) was basically the only way they could have avoided a war. Japan wanted a colonial empire, and the US and Europe didn't want them to have one. The US had imposed an oil embargo on Japan for their invasion of French Indo-China. From that moment on, Japan was on a timer. They were going to run out of resources and any capacity to make war within two years. Their choices were to give up on their imperial ambitions, or go to war. Of course you could argue that imperialism is bad and they should have accepted that they didn't get to become a superpower. That would have been the purely rational decision. But asking a nation that spent the past few generations rapidly playing catch-up to the West, who thought they had earned their seat at the table, to just accept their status as a second-class nation, forever, was a non-starter. So they went to war and made the best plans they could, their theory being that if they took out the US fleet in Hawaii and the British in the Dutch East Indies (whom they did expect to have their hands full with Germany) they could establish such a dominant position in the Pacific that the US, looking at the cost in money and lives to push them out, would decide they didn't really care that much about French Indo-China and Manchuria.
It wasn't a crazy theory. Before Pearl Harbor, the American public really didn't have any appetite for getting into another war and certainly would have balked at sending American men overseas to fight for China. Japan did underestimate how quickly the US could recover and start churning out ships and planes and men, and they definitely overestimated their own abilities, but mostly they underestimated just how pissed off America would be by the attack on Pearl Harbor.
With regards to (2), the Japanese government was in many ways kind of a mess in the 30s and 40s. Assassinations were common. Junior officers sometimes assassinated senior officers they considered not zealous enough. That plus the traditional Japanese way of decision-making, which was by seeking consensus, rather than having one person or group make unilateral decisions, meant that they found themselves in the awkward position where basically everyone knew that going to war with the US was a bad idea, but no one dared to be the one who'd speak up and say "This is a bad idea." We know from extensive interviews after the war that many of the high command and cabinet officials who went along with the decision were all hoping someone else would object.
(Keep in mind, the Emperor himself did not traditionally make decisions; he simply approved of decisions that were presented to him. Hirohito actually broke tradition several times by asking questions and even suggesting that he wasn't convinced.)
So, you had kind of a tragic farce where Japan, because of pride and national interests and tradition, boxed itself into a course of action no one really wanted.
Now, there were a few fanatics, and as the war went on, there was more of that "copium" in which they issued flat-out deranged and counterfactual battle reports while insisting that the Japanese fighting spirit would more than make up for the fact that the Americans were pouring more ships, troops, and planes into the theater every day than Japan had left, and Japanese soldiers were running out of everything from food to ammo to oil. But that was later in the war, after they were committed and it was basically win or die.
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