tl;dr: Japan's decision to go to war with the Allies wasn't really the product of coherent national strategy, but forced to an extent because Japan needed raw materials to continue its war in Manchuria and was facing the prospect of the military seizing more power in government if it did not win that war in China. The ideal outcome for Japan would have been to extend a defensive perimeter, take control of resource-rich European colonies, destroy the American fleet and then reach some sort of negotiated settlement that allowed it free access to resources in Southeast Asia and a free hand in China. But ... the Philippines were in between Japan and the colonial powers it faced in Southeast Asia, and the Philippines at the time were an American colony. So the Japanese would have no choice but to take on the American fleet.
So ... the longer version is below. I've answered variations on this question a few times (you get naked links because I have no idea how to make markdown work anymore, with New Reddit and mobile and all the apps):
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/80xu8w/did_the_japanese_seriously_consider_invading/
Adapted from those:
First off, there's no possible way that Japan could have invaded the mainland US or even Hawaii. The planned Midway invasion would probably realistically have been beyond the reach of the Japanese fleet train to sustain anything but a shoestring garrison, and in any case Midway was meant to draw the American fleet out to force it into a decisive battle, only secondarily to occupy territory.
That last point gets to the meat of your question. 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.