There were two over-arching and intersecting reasons why Nagumo's task force did not wait around or delay its attack to sink the carriers that were missing on 7 December.

Firstly, Operation Z, the Japanese air attack on Hawaii, was strategically-timed with the larger Japanese offensives in SE Asia, the Philippines, and the American islands in the Central Pacific (Wake and Guam). Yamamoto and the rest of the planners of Operation Z intended the extreme concentration of Japanese carrier strength to deliver a knock-out blow to the American fleet at Pearl Harbor to prevent said fleet from interfering from these other offensives. This made for a very tight time schedule for Nagumo; the IJN plans called for his carriers to assist in the follow-up offensives after this initial wave of attacks. Kido Butai was additionally operating at the tail-end of a long logistical line. The ships of the Japanese task force actually pioneered a number of novel methods of refueling while underway, nonetheless the margins were tight and the Japanese did have a schedule to keep. The timing of the air attacks on Hawaii coupled with the need to steam to a safe area, it makes little tactical sense to remain in the same area as where they launched their attacks, meant that the delicate balance of refueling rendezvous would have been thrown off-balance.

The other rationale for Nagumo's actions during and after the attack was that the Japanese did expect there to be carriers at Pearl on the morning of 7 December. The massive attack on the target ship Utah was because some of the first-wave pilots mistook her for a carrier. This attack wasted precious torpedoes, which Kido Butai had very few left in reserve after the first-wave attacks. The Japanese planners had figured that Sunday was one of the best times to catch the most desirable targets in harbor. And they were not wrong. Enterprise was expected to be in port on 6 December but a storm delayed her arrival until just after the attack. Some of the American carrier's planes managed to fly into the attack. The other two American carriers in the Pacific on 7 December, Lexington and Saratoga, were on resupply and maintenance missions respectively. Operation Z changed these missions, but neither ship was near Pearl on 7 December.

So Kido Butai could not simply afford to wait around for carriers that were not present during their attacks. Both fuel and munitions were at critical stocks and the Japanese had managed to achieve a major blow with relatively low losses. In hindsight, a search for missing carriers would have been more productive use of Japanese power than attacking the American battleline. Yet, subsequent wartime experience showed that spotting enemy ships at the open oceans prior to airborne radar was a haphazard affair. Visual reports from carrier-based scouts at Coral Sea and Midway were often incorrect and caused more than their fair-share of confused attacks. Kido Butai might have lucked out in such an encounter, but the odds would have been against Nagumo as his task force was running short of supplies, his aircrew and planes tired, and was deep inside enemy territory.