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Notes -
The most serious attempts I've seen at quantifying colonial legacies mostly focus on one comparison where the empires had enough colonized countries as data points to at least hope to draw tentative conclusions:
"One strand of this literature suggests that colonization by the
British led to better outcomes than colonization by the French or by the
smaller colonial powers, because of either the adaptability of British legal
institutions to the market economy or the higher levels of personal freedom
provided by British political institutions and culture"
But even in that article there's a laundry list of difficult confounders.
How much worse must the question be if we try to compare the handful of uncolonized countries? Japan did very well on its own, adopting and adapting many Western ideas and institutions (ironically including the "set off and try to colonize everyone" one, right at the time when the West itself was starting to realize that was at least a bit gauche...) without having to have most of those institutions externally imposed (with the one big exception of "wait, DON'T set off and try to colonize everyone", post-WWII). Ethiopia (for whom we'll ignore WWII; they were about as "colonized" as France was) is seeing some fast catch-up growth in the 21st century, but has a long way to go and didn't make so much progress in the 20th. Similar for Nepal and Bhutan. Tonga is doing better than those three, but not notably better than its post-colonial neighbors. Thailand is doing better than Tonga, but it's in between the Philippines and Malaysia.
And ... is that all the data? You might count Scandinavia doing well, but being right next to the Industrial Revolution's epicenter is a hell of a confounder. You could say that China or Iran or others have never been technically colonized by Europeans for long, but the technicalities kind of pale before the Century of Humiliation or even just the downstream effects of the 1953 Iranian coup.
Where does the Perry Expedition fit into this? "On its own" kind of ignores how the Americans forced Japan open to the West and to adopt Western idea.
That's fair. I think the way it fits, though, is the lack of micromanagement. "You have to allow your people to trade with us" and "we completely rule you now" seem quite different to me ... but you're right that they're on the same spectrum, and historically the former tended to lead to the latter in the long term. Would you really say that's enough to claim Americans forced Japan to adopt Western ideas in general, though? The adoption was fast, on a historical scale, and it was not the kind of adoption that was forced on ruled colonies, where e.g. massive expansion of an independent military would be frowned on, to say the least. Even though the Iwakura Mission etc. were encouraged by the west, the Japanese modernizers weren't under orders and weren't hostages ... except in the long-term sense, I suppose, where it was obvious that they wouldn't be treated with as a political equal by modern powers (and thus would constantly be at risk of another power going too far) until/unless they became an economic and technological equal.
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