"You keep using that Word. I do not think that word means what you think it means."

Now it's possible that Tom Hanks intended something other than to say our war against Japan was motivated entirely by racism and terror (at about the 3:35 mark), but frankly the segment is so fluffy that one can read anything into it (via Big Hollywood):

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Regardless, there's some facts that ought to be on display:

• The Japanese regarded themselves as the divinely chosen master race.
• As a consequence, they treated prisoners of war, be they European, American, or Asian, abominably, including performing medical experiments on them in the manner of Nazi doctors in the death camps.
• Their war of conquest, leading up to and after Pearl Harbor, was likewise a consequence of their belief. Although they had no specific wish to conquer North America, they did want the USA out of the Pacific so they could dominate it, and they had no problem making war on us to do so.
• The reason Japanese units were wiped out nearly wholesale is that they usually refused to surrender, considering it a dishonor worse than death (which also factored into their treatment of prisoners).

None of this is widely disputed. To ignore it, and to then pain the Pacific War as a reactionary frisson against the Yellow Peril is quite frankly an intellectual perversion.

In fairness to Hanks, we haven't seen the thing, so we don't know if he's in fact done that. All of this might well be a tempest in a teapot. But the choice of words, it does not fill us with satisfaction.