The goal of Japan wasn't to "beat" the US, in the sense of invading it and occupying it, but rather to force it to a negotiated peace. Here are some past threads on the topic that I've contributed to:
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3tbpap/did_the_japanese_at_pearl_harbor_consider/
To quote from that first link:
Japan was quite aware that a long war against the U.S. was not winnable. Their war aims were to secure the resources of Southeast Asia (in particular oil, but also rubber and other industrial supplies). They couldn't do that with a U.S. presence in the Philippines. So their overall war plan, which saw successive revisions throughout the decades before 1941, was to quickly defeat colonial powers in Southeast Asia, and to build a defensive perimeter that the U.S. fleet would be attrited by before a final annihilating battle, after which the U.S. would sue for peace. The idea was that the American fleet, steaming west, would have to face Japanese air power and submarine attacks before making it to the vicinity of the Philippines or the home islands, where it would be decisively beaten.
To that end, the Japanese fleet's composition emphasized quality over quantity; they trained very elite naval aviators, for example, but very few of them. They also emphasized night fighting, the use of torpedoes, and an offensive spirit that was reckless and dashing, all to overcome numerical weakness that was inevitable given the two countries' industrial bases. At the start of the war, the Japanese arguably had the finest air fleet in the world, absolutely had the largest battleships, and had unparalleled torpedo technology.
In the immediate run-up to WWII, the Japanese naval leadership conceived the plan of striking the Pacific fleet in Pearl Harbor at the same time as planned strikes on US, Dutch and British possessions in the Philippines and elsewhere. The Pearl Harbor attack was inspired partly by the British raid on Taranto, and was designed to cripple the U.S. fleet in harbor to win the Japanese extra time to build that defensive perimeter. To say that the political leadership underestimated America's resolve for a long war is an understatement.
For some reading regarding Japanese prewar plans, Peattie and Evans, Kaigun: Strategy, Tactics, and Technology in the Imperial Japanese Navy, 1887-1941 is the gold standard. It covers both operational and strategic developments in the building of the navy, and how those influenced one another. It is weak on airpower, because the two realized they were writing a long book already, but Peattie used much of their research to write the companion volume Sunburst: The Rise of Japanese Naval Air Power, 1909-1941 (Evans has passed away).