They did and it didn’t fare well for them. There’s a reason Southeast Asia was called the Southern Resource Area. Manchuria, Siberia, and parts of Mongolia were the Northern Resource Area. For seven years, sporadic conflicts and fighting broke out between the Soviets and the Japanese, and while the Soviets suffered more casualties, the Japanese were repeatedly defeated and had to sign a neutrality pact once they lost all the Soviet and Mongolian land they had taken. Nearly 60,000 people became casualties in this border conflict. It was also where Georgy Zhukov gained his first experience commanding large formations of troops in battle.