Were Japan and the United States bound to go to war, regardless to what was happening in Europe?

Japan in the early 20th century possessed a large population, rapidly modernizing society, and burgeoning industry, but was short of space and resource poor. Their solution to this quandary was to join the "great game," that is to say, become a colonial power. As early as 1894-95, when the Japanese roundly thrashed China in the Sino-Japanese War, Japan had been attempting to gain a lodgement in China. As a result of this war they gained the coastal city of Port Arthur, but were compelled by threat of military intervention by France, Germany and Russia to cede it back to China. After winning another crushing victory in the Russo-Japanese War of 1905, Japan took control of Port Arthur and would hold it for the next forty years. In 1910, Japan annexed Korea. In 1931, taking advantage of the chaos which gripped China, Japan staged an incident as a pretext to annexing Northeastern China, called Manchuria.

In 1937, Japan utilized a minor border skirmish to begin an all-out conquest of China, under the pretext that rather than annexing it into its empire, Japan was saving China from the rapacious westerners who had sent her reeling into chaos forty years earlier following the Boxer Rebellion. China at this time was divided between the Nationalists and the Communists, who were enjoying quite the bitter civil war. Partially as a result of the publicization of Japanese atrocities, most famously the weeks-long orgy of destruction known as the Rape of Nanking, and perhaps out of fear that European and American colonial possessions would be next on Japan's shopping list, western opinion turned sharply against the Japanese. The United States, who remained Japan's primary supplier of oil and steel, enacted increasingly stern economic measures to attempt to force Japan out of China, eventually stopping the aforementioned oil and steel trade. With these materials cut off, Japan faced a choice between retreat from China and war with the United States. Japan's government felt trapped between two miserable options. Either they entered into a virtually unwinnable war with a nation that both severely outnumbered them and possessed more than ten times the industrial capacity, or they faced the potentially ruinous consequences of backing down. There was a very real threat that hardliner elements within the Japanese military would coup the government if any attempt to pursue the latter course was attempted.

So, Japan went to war.