It can if it changes sides at some point before December 1941. This is easier if done earlier, but its possible, if the leaders can make the change in mindset there are many scenarios possible. Heres a simple one:
Circa 1936-37 the faction wanting to start war with China are suppressed.
Negotiations with China started. These need not be sincere over the long haul, but are aimed at at least temporarily reducing tensions. Note that this would leave German officers and other support with the KMT government longer.
Well, I'd argue it wouldn't be quite so simple to 'suppress the faction trying to start wars,' simply due to the fact that it wasn't so much a faction pushing for war as independent military officers (quite a few officers, actually, during a good portion of the interwar period) instigating diplomatic incidents and forcing the government to go along with the militaristic mess, like with the Mukden incident, where Kwantung Army officers staged a bombing of a Japanese railroad, and the Marco Polo Bridge Incident, where an officer ignored peace talks and kept shelling the Chinese. Then there was the First Shanghai Incident in 1932, where the Japanese military staged attacks on Japanese monks and bombed and invaded Shanghai in pseudo-retaliation while refusing to adhere to a ceasefire for 2 months.
Moreover, the civilian government wasn't exactly in charge when it came to Japan's overseas policy (not that the public minded—they were winning, after all) and the desire to dominate China's not a 1930s phenomenon. Anti-militarist officials tended to be forced out of office or assassinated, the army had their 3 little coup plans and one attempt (where no one was really punished), and the whole country drifted into a militaristic mess that the people supported and the pacifist elements in the government were powerless to stop.
Japan was going to war with China; the Japanese knew it, the Chinese knew it, pretty much everyone knew what was coming. The Japanese military was willing to poison relations with all its neighbors for the sake of expansion and rejecting pretty much all international arbitration for as long as possible. The military and navy weren't fond of the US,UK, or USSR, mainly because the former two tried imposing limits on them and the latter was a threat to Manchuria, so the civilian government trying to improve relations wouldn't have been able to do much.
Negotiations are meaningless if one party refuses to adhere to them, as the First Shanghai and Marco Polo Bridge Incidents proved, so it's not as simple as just negotiations starting because chances are that some Kwantung officer would start a war once they (mistakenly or not) believe that the Japanese would stop their advance into the mainland. Plus, the Japanese military was cocky as hell (heavily underestimating both the USSR and US and expecting way too easy a victory in China). The Second Sino-Japanese War was bound to happen in the 1930-40 timeframe with how trigger-happy the Kwantung Army was and that gets them into the problems of OTL's Chinese quagmire, international pariah status, and not having enough oil or rubber to conduct war.