Might be quite an intangible thing. But were there any decisions by nationalist movement leaders that were influenced by gamble that the Japanese were going to lose soon?
This is going to be specific to the Vietnamese, as that is what i best understand.
Ho Chi Minh expected Japan to lose to the Americans for at least several years. He had been organizing resistance against the Japanese and the Vichy French occupiers (though nowhere near the scale of the later Indochinese wars) and had been hoping for US support during the war. There was several reasons why Ho Chi Minh sought the aid of the Americans during the Second World War. One was purely pragmatic as he needed resources to conduct a proper guerrila operation against the Japanese and Vichy occupiers.
However, he wanted to court the Americans because he suspected that, come the end of the war, France would be looking to reassert dominance in its colonial holdings. Despite being an ardent communist, Ho Chi Minh actually did not want to go to the Soviet Union for assistance because of several reasons. One is that the United States (specifically Roosevelt) had a more explicit standing against French colonialism and was a much closer ally to France than the Soviet Union. Secondly, Ho Chi Minh was caught up in some purges during his time in the Soviet Union in the twenties which understandably soured his view of the nation. After the Japanese surrender, the Indochinese Communist Party took control of Hanoi in an attempt to prevent French bureaucracy from reforming and attempted to separate from France. However, US support was divided, with the OSS split between whether or not to support Ho Chi Minh. In the end, Ho Chi Minh didn't get the American pressure on France that he would have liked and despite negotiations for a peaceful separation, it was ultimately not to be.
Source: Ho Chi Minh: A Life by William Duiker. I found this book to be a compelling story on not only Ho Chi Minh, but the politics of Vietnam during his time.