Well with Japanese it was much simpler, it is no that they hated US in particular they just wanted to build their very own asian empire. Their biggest problem was that being dependent on oil imports, when US cut off their supplies over the atrocities that Japanese army was committing in China they were stuck. The big alternative history question is what would happen if Japanese ignored Hawaii, Saipan, Phillipines and only concentrated on British holding like Singapore and Hong Kong.
Or, if they had simply stopped in China and tried to play nice with the USA to buy time. It might have been more like the end of WWI, where the Japanese were the beneficiaries in Asia of the Europeans having killed each other.