Surely the trigger goes back way beyond no just "diplomatic blunders" in Aug-Nov 41, but also 1940 and all the way back to Japanese strategic decisions in the 20s/30s.
The chain of reasoning that led up to Pearl Harbour went something like this:
Japan must conquer China.
To conquer China, Japan must be self-sufficient (there's an argument to swap the first two around, but it's immaterial as both meant the same and led to the same place).
To be self sufficient, Japan must have oil.
To have oil, Japan must conquer the Dutch EI.
To have the Dutch EI, Japan must remove the US from the Philippines (which could interfere with the supply routes).
To remove the US from the Philippines, Japan must defeat the US in war.
To defeat the US in war, Japan must destroy the numerically superior US fleet.
To destroy the numerically superior US fleet, Japan must rely on a defensive "perimeter" of ground-based aircraft to support a single decisive naval battle.
To construct a defensive "perimeter" of ground-based aircraft, Japan needs time.
To buy time, Japan needs to swiftly destroy, or at least put out of immediate action, the US Pacific Fleet.
To put the US Pacific Fleet out of action, Japan must bomb Pearl Harbor.
I'm sure I missed something but this covers the basics.
If you want to avoid Pearl Harbor, you need to give Japan an alternative course of action that meets it's strategic goals, and there just weren't any. They could attack the Philippines directly, but that would only invoke the immediate wrath of the untouched Pacific Fleet before their "perimeter" is in place. A northern push into Russia is off the table because the Soviets defeated the Japanese previously, and also because there isn't any immediately exploitable oil (that anyone knows about at this time). You could remove the need for a Chinese war, as Japan only "needs" oil to maintain that conflict, but that's intrinsically linked with Japanese prestige/survival in the minds of senior Japanese military leaders at the time (who are also disposed towards assassinating any civilian leaders that carelessly suggest otherwise).