While the colonial dimension has factored into fairly recent defenses of the atomic bombing (Richard Franks likes to use it sometimes), the fate of the Japanese colonies had been decided long before August 1945. The Allies had made public their decision to eliminate Japan's colonial possessions with the Cairo Declaration of 1943 which affirmed a commitment to restore Chinese territory Japan seized in 1894 and decried Japan's "enslavement of the people of Korea." While working knowledge of these regions in the State Department was minimal to non-existent (one rumor was that Secretary of State Edward Stettinius had to look at a globe to find Korea), there was a strong commitment within Allied diplomatic circles to eliminate Japan's colonial possessions. While the Americans may have waffled on details and the timeframe of national self-determination and return to China, there was a consensus that Japan had forfeited its rights to these territories because of its actions. Inside Nationalist China, the KMT was actively preparing to retake control over both Taiwan and Manchuria and formed political cadres that would seize control over Japanese governmental infrastructure for that end.

One could actually argue that the telescoping the end of the war, either through the bombs or a sudden Soviet invasion, made the postwar situation for Japan's former colonies worse than what would have come from a more orderly transition. Japanese power evaporated over the course of a few weeks in August, leaving the Allied powers to extemporize some form of post-colonial government. In Taiwan, mainlander suspicions about Taiwanese collaboration with the Japanese fostered a highly tense political transition in which KMT purges and expropriations ultimately flared up in the 28 February 1947 Incident, where KMT troops clashed with Taiwanese demonstrators. The power vacuum in Korea, when coupled with an incredibly ad hoc occupation policy help contribute to a growth in factionalism among the embryonic Korean political parties. One month after the surrender, the H. Merrill Bennighoff, the chief political advisor to the US military governor of Korea, reported to Washington that "Southern Korea can best be described as a powder keg ready to explode at the application of a spark." The factionalism in Korean politics continued to escalate, as did political violence, and was not an insubstantial cause for the Korean War.

It is making a revision too far to lay the blame for East Asian political turmoil at the feet of Allied planners wishing to hasten the end of the war. In Taiwan, the fifty-year gap between nominal Chinese rule and 1945 meant that Taiwan had developed a very different political culture than the mainland and it was very likely that wartime enmity towards the Japanese would carry over towards the acculturated Taiwanese. Moreover, regime transition was incredibly difficult in places like Germany where Allied planners had extensive knowledge of and large prewar institutional and personal connections to facilitate the transition. Outside of a few missionaries, Western contact with Korea was minimal and so the ad hoc policies were a logical outcome. But the sudden end of the war did create a great deal of chaos and many of the formerly colonized were the ones most hurt by this transition. To use Japan's admittedly exploitative colonial order to justify the atomic bombings needs to acknowledge this reality.