The war plan had three phases: seize the southern areas and establish a perimeter, strengthen that perimeter, then destroy forces that tried to penetrate it. The material problem was that conquered resources only helped if their infrastructure could be taken intact or rebuilt quickly enough for exploitation. A plan aimed at destroying American will to fight also revealed that Japan could not directly eliminate the United States' underlying capacity to fight. Pearl Harbor fits this sequence as an attack that reduced immediate interference while Japan pursued its southern objectives, rather than the war's intended final encounter.
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The southern-perimeter war plan
The wider Japanese plan linked the Hawaiian strike to seizing a southern resource zone, consolidating a perimeter, and defeating later counterattacks.