ORIGINAL: WraithMagus
The likes of Hitler and his closest advisors were actually avid readers... of "Boy's Adventure" stories, kind of like stuff like Johnny Quest, but books. Their way of looking at the world was that a few DESTINED HEROES could overcome unlimited odds because DESTINY SAYS SO! The Japanese, especially the army commanders, simply had confidence that the Americans could show up with three-to-one odds outnumbering the Japanese, and the Japanese would still win. (The decidedly awful showing from the US top brass with doctrinal inflexibility and refusal to take the Japanese seriously due to entrenched racist beliefs when giving "secret" aid to China that resulted in little more than free XP for Japanese pilots helped this. The US would learn some very costly lessons early war about taking the opponent seriously.)
Speaking of Johnny Quest and "Boy's Adventure", the Japanese kinda had their own "destined heroes" in the form of the samurai and the ninja. In December 1939, Ambassador Grew warned that attempts to defeat Japan via economic sanctions ignored Japanese psychology. He stated that "Japan is a nation of hardy warriors, still inculcated with the samurai do-or-die spirit, which has by tradition and inheritance become ingrained in the race." Grew went on to note that the Japanese throughout their history have faced periodic cataclysms brought about by nature and by man; earthquakes, typhoons, tsunamis, epidemics, the blighting of crops, and almost constant wars within and without the country. By long experience they were inured to hardship, and to regimentation.
The historian H.P. Willimott pointed out that Japan in 1941 was "a nation with no experience of defeat and, more importantly a nation (that believed itself) created by gods, and ruled by a god. This religious dimension provided the basis for the belief in the superiority of Japanese martial commitment--Yamato damashii--that was the guarantee against national defeat.
That said, I do think it's worth pushing back on the notion that having greater industrial strength inherently means you will win any war.
Japan's industrial poverty relative to that of the both the U.S. and the Soviet Union, certainly encouraged an acceptance of spiritual power over material strength to compensate. Even after its punishing defeat at Nomohan against the Soviets, which should have been a signal warning to the perils of warring with industrial giants with lots of tanks, the Imperial Japanese Army's operational thinking remained essentially primitive, unscientific, complacent and narrow. Their rationale was that the quantity and quality of the materiel possessed by Japan's enemies (and sheer numbers) could only be offset by ruthlessly encouraging intangible factors such as high morale, fanatic spirit and utter fearlessness in close fighting against men and armor. The experience of World War I, as processed in the Imperial Japanese Army, was that hardness was a prerequisite for survival and success in modern high-tech combat. Discipline, already harsh by Western standards, was tightened to the limit of everyday endurance.
The U.S. certainly found out in Korea and Vietnam that sheer industrial muscle was no guarantee of victory either. However, even earlier U.S. wars should have pointed out even poorly industrialized nations can punch above their weight. For reasons of honor, the Southern Confederacy, like the Japanese in WW2, fought on against shrinking odds and with an inferior manufacturing base long after any reasonable hope of victory had passed. Americans may have assumed, correctly, that Japan could not win a sustained war against the United States. What they failed to consider was one of the lessons of history. A so-called 'have-not' nation may well be possessed of a will and skill far out of proportion to her resources. Just because Japan couldn't win in the long run, didn't mean it couldn't be a ruthless contender.
