I've heard that Yamamoto believed Japan could not win, but felt duty bound to serve anyway after it became clear the fight would happen with or without him. He seemed to also understand Pearl harbor would incite and not crush fighting spirit. First I've heard that leadership in general could have believed they would lose the fight they were starting. But politicians are weird, and I guess many of them would rather lose (elections, wars) rather than lose control (of parties, or countries). This has it's own kind of perverted logic but political thinking isn't military thinking
You can’t really distinguish the two in this case, Tojo ran a military dictatorship and moderate politicians had been murdered to make way. We shouldn’t disregard the role racist ideology played, but that paper shows how the likelihood of honorable defeat was deemed preferable to ignominious surrender in Japan, and how ignorance of Japanese culture led the US to miscalculate when it imposed an oil embargo on the Japanese.
