During times of friendly relations with Western nations, the Japanese have laid out a linguistic welcome mat to foreign vocabulary items, particularly English.
They generally import a word and then pummel it into a shape that fits Japanese pronunciation patterns. (English also takes this approach, as witnessed by sa-key and karry-oh-key, the none-too-accurate western pronunciations of sake and karaoke). In Japanese, loanwords are called gairaigo ("words coming from outside") and written in katakana phonetic characters.
What might have been described a decade ago as a "flood" of gairaigo has now turned into a tsunami. Gairaigo opponents protest that overuse has already rendered a sizable chunk of Japanese incomprehensible to the average native speaker. Some confused citizens, including my Japanese mother-in-law, complain they can no longer understand publications from the local government, much less computer manuals, where gairaigo like gurafikaru-yuza-intafesu (graphic user interface) overwhelm the pre-e-mail generation.