America is the foreign country most familiar to Japanese people -- and the hardest one for Japanese filmmakers to get right.
Often they want to emulate the styles of their American idols -- be they Hollywood icons like Howard Hawks or contemporary hipsters like Quentin Tarantino -- but end up with creaky cliches and obvious lifts instead. Or they try to be funny, the way their favorite American films are funny, but their jokes come across as generic or stereotypical. Then, when they try to sympathize with their American minority characters, they tend to caricature or patronize them.
Other foreign directors working in America tend to either successfully adapt to the Hollywood system or film their own, entertainingly subjective portraits of the country (Percy Adlon, Aki Kaurismaki). Japanese filmmakers, I think, often want to have it both ways -- to affect the pose of insiders, while keeping their "uniquely" Japanese distance from their American material.