This was a little known war that may have led to Pearl Harbor. The Jappers were soundly thrashed by the Soviet armor, and it may have led them to give up any attempt to take Soviet territory, and create their empire in eastern and southern Asia. That put them in conflict with the USA’s interests in the region.
That's the current thinking, yet a naval advance into the Dutch East Indies to secure working oil fields & refineries made a heckuva lot more sense for the Japanese economy than pushing a borderline here or there in the permafrost in the hopes of maybe, one day, drilling a well in that area.
I personally think that the Steel & Oil embargos against Japan did a lot more to seal the fate of Pearl Harbor, Wake, Guam & the PI than anything else.
I do agree that when Hitler expected Japan to attack through Siberia he was asking a bit too much from his reluctant ally. The Japanese got beat like a drum in Manchuria.
It was the Japanese Navy that wanted to go south. The U.S oil embargo was hurting the Japanese badly. When the final plans for Pearl Harbor were put in motion, the Japanese fleet was down to something like a 90 day reserve of fuel.
Japan went to war to seize the oil fields of Indonesia. The inexorable logic [to them] of attacking the Dutch was the inevitability of Great Britain jumping in, and the high probability of the U.S engaging in hostilities. So the Navy won the battle, to go south. And since the principal threat to their operations was the U.S Pacific fleet, which FDR had moved to Pearl, Yamamoto decided to preemptively strike there.
Interestingly, the Soviet spy in Tokyo, Richard Sorge, was able to ascertain that the Japanese were not going to attack Siberia, allowing Stalin to withdraw the divisions that counterattacked the Germans in front of Moscow, drove them back, and broke the myth [in WW II] of German invincibility.