Well that certainly depends on who you ask and what "something" is, but generally speaking, the strongest case for a sort of "positive colonialism" that I've ever heard is made by Niall Ferguson and tends to focus on places like Hong Kong, which by most accounts, was/is better off as a result of it being under British rule than it might have otherwise been had it remained a part of Qing, then Nationalist, and finally Communist China. Arguments like this are generally not very popular among historians because they are very easily conflated with racist, Eurocentric worldviews that view indigenous societies and cultures as somehow lesser than European ones, needing to be brought up to the level of European civilization.

But again, this is a highly subjective question. You ask ten historians/lawyers/locals you'll get ten different answers.

Edit: Japan was not colonized by European powers. There was a brief period of unequal treaties, between 1853 and about 1890, that really spurred Japanese development along Western lines, based on a desire to get rid of the unequal treaties, but calling that colonialism would be inaccurate, I'm afraid.