Most probably not. Although the Japanese generally avoided attacking Russian ships, there simply was not a lot of Soviet merchant shipping in the Pacific at the time. And perhaps more important, there were almost no Soviet warships in the region, so the chance of the Japanese attackers encountering and engaging with Russian ships by accident was small. Even if they had, Japan and Russia had chosen to gloss over incidents in the recent past because they calculated it was in their larger interests to do so. The chance that Japanese attackers might have damaged Russian ships did not affect Japanese planning.

American ports were not closed to Russian warships or merchant ships. A fleet of 11 Soviet ships, for example, left port at Balboa, U.S. Canal Zone, in July 1939, for the Russians' naval base at Vladivostok. Four mine layers among the fleet went by way of San Francisco, and the other ships went by way of the merchant shipping port facilities next to Honolulu.

Russian freighters and tankers often used port facilities in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, and Dutch Harbor, Alaska. It was Russia's merchant ships, not its navy, that crossed the Pacific at this time. At the beginning of World War 2, many of the Soviet Union's warships, in fact, had been purchased from or built by the U.S. The bulk of its navy was based in the west, in Leningrad, Kronstadt, Sevastopol, Odessa, and Murmansk.

Soviet maritime activity, both mercantile and military, had waxed and waned from the late 19th century to the World War 2 period. Japan was a regional rival and this tension erupted in the 1904-05 Russo-Japanese War, in the course of which Japan all but obliterated the Russian fleet and emerged as a world naval power. The 1917 Russian Revolution and 1919-21 civil war drew off much of the Russian military presence in the Far East and Pacific region, but it began to build up again, including at its Pacific base in Vladivostok, in response to Japanese incursions in China in the late 1920s and into the 1930s. The Soviet Pacific Ocean Fleet at that time consisted almost entirely of small submarines, torpedo boats, and coastal patrol boats.

Almost all of the Soviets' "blue water," heavy warships were in the west. This did not have anything to do with American policy regarding its ports. In short, Russian warships would not have been cruising the Pacific, either in Hawaii or the Philippines, before the war. They were needed elsewhere.

The Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact was signed in April 1941. Cross-border skirmishes in Japanese-occupied Manchuria and in Mongolia motivated Japan to sign in order to keep Russia from tying it down in northern Asia while it accomplished its goals of territorial expansion in Southeast Asia. Russia signed it because it was focusing its military might to the west, supplying Germany with food and war material, in line with the August 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, but also preparing for a confrontation with Germany itself. That came in June 1941, when Germany suddenly invaded the Soviet Union.

At that time, Japan, as an ally of Germany, apparently briefly considered abrogating its neutrality pact with the Soviets and invading Russia, but decided against it in favor of focusing on military conquests toward the south. Both the Soviets and the Japanese found it expedient to honor their neutrality pact throughout most of the war. That included, for Japan, allowing passage to Russian merchant ships that were carrying supplies from the U.S. to Vladivostok.

After the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the U.S. had conducted its Russian trade warily, with some constraints on what it would allow to be sold to the Russians (to try to prevent material from being further shipped to Germany). Britain, during this time, pressed the U.S. to drastically reduce its trade with Germany, Italy, and Japan, as well as Russia, as a partner in its "economic warfare."

From the summer of 1941, after Germany invaded Russia, U.S. relations with the Soviet Union went into flux, as FDR's administration moved to convert a near-adversary into an ally. In September 1941, for example, FDR promised Russia that the U.S. would deliver five new B-17s, flying them to Russia over the skies of Germany. U.S. constraints on sales were lifted and America began shipping food, fuel, and other war material to Russia, via Vladivostok, under the terms of the Lend Lease Act.

At nearly the same time, Roosevelt, not wishing to subsidize Japan's expansion in Asia, stopped shipment of U.S. oil and gasoline to Japan. It was at this point that Japan concluded that it would have to go to war with the U.S. in order to ensure its own territorial expansion. From Japan's point of view, at least privately, the die had been cast. The U.S. was still, however, trying to sort out its interactions with Russia under the changed circumstances. No joint naval operations, for example, had been authorized by the U.S. Chief of Naval Operations by the end of 1941.

Although the Germans pressured their Japanese allies to stop the shipping of U.S. goods via Russian freighters to Vladivostok, it continued, mostly unmolested, throughout the war. Both the Russians and the Japanese generally went out of their way avoid conflict with each other, despite isolated incidents. On May 1, 1942, a Japanese submarine sunk the Soviet cargo ship Angarstroi, loaded with sugar, in the Sea of Japan after it was detained, searched, and released by the Japanese Navy. At first, the Japanese blamed it on an American submarine, but the Soviets were not fooled and tensions escalated. The same month, a Japanese submarine exchanged fire with a Russian freighter off the coast of Australia.

At that point in the war, Japan was riding on the crest of victories at Pearl Harbor and the Philippines and it is possible that some of its naval officers were emboldened enough to disregard the Russia-Japan Neutrality Pact. Both countries built up their forces facing each other, separating Siberia from Manchuria, and Outer Mongolia from Inner Mongolia, but Russian and Japanese diplomats and military officers decided to pass over the incidents at sea and Russia and Japan continued to avoid conflict.

The Japanese meticulously planned their attacks at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and, on the following day, at Manila. Their goal, which they largely (though only temporarily) achieved, was to destroy or disable the American Pacific fleet, especially its capital ships (aircraft carriers and battleships), in order to clear obstacles to the Japanese invasion of suth and southwest Asia, starting with the Philippines.

For the Pearl Harbor attack, the attacking Japanese pilots knew the composition of the American fleet and targeted specific ships. They were even prepared to fly to Maui in pursuit of these particular ships if the fleet had moved to its occasional anchorage at Lahaina.

The attackers, in other words, were not aiming to cause general chaos and destruction, but rather to destroy specific warships, to the extent that they could locate them. (The Americans' aircraft carriers happened to be out at sea that morning). The Japanese did not attack the merchant docks in Honolulu Harbor, and so, whatever foreign freighters happened to be there were not imperiled. The attack on the Philippines 10 hours later was aimed particularly at destroying U.S. military airpower in the Pacific, the B-17s and P-40s at Clark and Iba air bases. This would give Japan's airplanes uncontested control of the air and, therefore, allow the Japanese army's invasion of the Philippines.

During the months preceding the attack on Pearl Harbor, the war in Europe had essentially boiled down to a contest between the Axis Powers of Germany and Italy, and against them, the Soviet Union and Great Britain.

Six months before Pearl Harbor, Germany had launched an invasion of the Soviet Union, its erstwhile ally. By December 5, two days before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, German armies had advanced to within 5 miles of Moscow.

Hitler had decided to postpone a cross-channel invasion of Britain itself until his armies were able to defeat the Soviet Union, but Germany was still fighting Britain through aerial and missile bombing, and was engaged against Britain on the seas, as well as elsewhere in the British Empire, as in North Africa. In South Asia, Britain was also defending its colonies and commonwealth against Japan. On the face of it, especially in the long term and even with Lend-Lease aid from the United States, it is difficult to see how Britain could have continued the war without the entry of the United States into the conflict on its side. Presumably, Winston Churchill would have had to sue for peace, or endure a German invasion of the British Isles once the Nazis had consolidated their military strength in Europe.

That did not happen, of course. After Churchill heard that America had been attacked at Pearl Harbor, he rushed to a secure telephone to call Franklin Roosevelt. His Memoirs of the Second World War relate the following:

In two or three minutes Mr. Roosevelt came through. "Mr. President, what's this about Japan? "It's quite true," he replied. "They have attacked us at Pearl Harbor. We are all in the same boat now."

No American will think it wrong of me if I proclaim that to have the United States at our side was to me the greatest joy. I could not foretell the course of events. I do not pretend to have measured accurately the martial might of Japan, but now at this very moment I knew the United States was in the war, up to the neck and in to the death. So we had won after all!

Yes, after Dunkirk; after the fall of France; after the horrible episode of Oran; after the threat of invasion, when, apart from the Air and the Navy, we were an almost unarmed people; after the deadly struggle of the U-boat war—the first Battle of the Atlantic, gained by a hand's-breath; after seventeen months of lonely fighting and nineteen months of my responsibility in dire stress. We had won the war. England would live; Britain would live; the Commonwealth of Nations and the Empire would live.

How long the war would last or in what fashion it would end no man could tell, nor did I at this moment care. Once again in our long Island history we should emerge, however mauled or mutilated, safe and victorious. We should not be wiped out. We should not be wiped out. Our history would not come to an end. We might not even have to die as individuals. Hitler's fate was sealed. Mussolini's fate was sealed. As for the Japanese, they would be ground to powder.

United States forces played a direct role in defeating Germany, but also forced Hitler to keep huge military forces in Western Europe rather than sending them to reinforce his armies fighting against the Soviet Union, where they would likely have been a decisive factor against the Soviets. Instead, the German invasion of Russia failed after the effort that culminated at Stalingrad, and the German forces in Western Europe were eventually pushed back anyway, beginning with the landings at Normandy.

Your questions are hypothetical. They invite speculation. One of the delights of the alternate history genre of fiction is that its authors generally expend some considerable effort on the notion of history itself, especially the way in which history unwinds out of a skein of causes both large and small. In these novels, large and familiar causes and conditions and forces roll out across the world, but small human details, such as a missed appointment at the Reichs Ministry, an overlooked telegram, Hitler's mistress Eva Braun's choice of perfume on a fateful day, or a random batch of sunspots that interferes with a particular radio transmission, sometimes cascade into a vastly different history than the one with which we are familiar.