I know this might be controversial, but what exactly led the Japanese to do this? What was the strategical reason?
I don't know why it would be particularly controversial, unless you believe some sort of conspiracy theory about Roosevelt.
This thread goes into some detail about it -- definitely check out u/parksungjun's answer that's linked in it too.
To quote from my answer there:
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).
For some reading about Midway, the current best book out there is Parshall and Tully, Shattered Sword: The Untold Story of the Battle of Midway. It's The first history of Midway that draws heavily upon Japanese primary sources and dives into Japanese doctrine and tactics. Does an especially good job of telling the story from the Japanese perspective while rebutting or refuting many of the tropes about the battle and the "failings" that armchair admirals like to point out.
So long story short it was a move to buy time. Japan knew it could not win a protracted war with the US. But it also needed access to resources from somewhere in order to secure its new empire and continue its war in China which the US was against and using economic pressure over. This included a damaging oil and scrap metal embargo, thus the resource rich Dutch East Indies and South Pacific became the objective. However it was not thought by Japan that such a seizure could occur without dragging the US into the war in part because of the US presence in the Philippines astride the Japanese axis of advance and supply lines. And the strategy to defeat the US was to blood them badly enough to defeat their entire fleet in one decisive battle and force them to the table where at least some of Japan's new possessions would be kept.
So attacking and ideally paralyzing the Pacific Fleet was a move to buy time to secure both the resources and begin to build up their outer series of island bases with mutually supporting air groups. These perimeter islands were part of the plan to bleed the eventual US counterattack badly enough to be destroyed in one great battle in the spirit of Mahan. Ideally before the Allies economic muscles began to tell.
We have actually had several excellent threads on the topic recently. I would suggest other responses by /u/Jschooltiger and /u/kieslowskifan in them as good treatments of the topic too.