So in the same way that some Americans with no Asian ancestry in the slightest, or any spiritual inclinations towards the Tao or Buddhism or anything like that

So in the same way that some Americans with no Asian ancestry in the slightest, or any spiritual inclinations towards the Tao or Buddhism or anything like that might get a tattoo or article of clothing with certain symbols, i.e. yin-yang, or some bit of Arabic or Chinese or Japanese writing as decoration, the Japanese take a similar attitude to English or Spanish or Christian (Catholic in particular) writing and symbols. They use English as window dressing because it’s cool. Most Japanese kids will take English in school, but few will ever attain any real fluency in the language. So if you sprinkle in some gratuitous English into your signage, clothing and television scripts or character designs, then you are cool, and you can still effectively communicate to some degree because while almost no one is fluent, they can still understand at least small amounts of English at a time. I’m not sure that still holds up with younger generations, but at least at one point it was the case.