Map is inaccurate, Japan and South Korea are colonies in all but name
Just missing the -r recursive flag for the European colony colonies. It’s turtles all the way down.
Imo:
Japanese state is a junior partner, unless you also want to claim Germany is colonized by the US. Parts of Japan are colonial, e.g. Okinawa which was colonized by Japan and is currently a occupied by both Japan and the US military.
Otoh, Korea was subjected to Japanese colonialism, which in SK transitioned into a pro-west puppet government. I think this probably counts as a colonial relation still.
Japan was basically a whole ass empire itself getting colonized, and its imperial core while still being subjugated and extracted from in a colonial way also received extra privileges and continued to be a sort of lesser core for the new American imperial holdings in Asia and the Pacific.
Like the American economic strategy for how to exploit all of those countries was a model (which was explicitly racist, because of course it was) drawn up by an Imperial Japanese economist and the State Department internally was explicitly describing their strategy as wanting to rebuild and restore Imperial Japan as a controlled client state of the US. But then the economic model imposed on Japan itself was also one of colonial extraction as it was industrialized to produce commodities for Americans to consume and harsher working conditions were imposed on Japanese workers on the suggestion of American businessmen.
