I suppose that short Japanese words have the advantage of being something that the Anglosphere knows about enough to be acquainted with, distant enough to not have too many opinions about, while also being easily pronounceable from the transliteration. If so, I'm going to provide a few examples:

Other candidates with easily pronounceable romanizations (from an Anglophone perspective) that are more culturally proximate than Japanese: Italian, Spanish, Russian, Hawai'ian

Other candidates with easily pronounceable romanizations (from an Anglophone perspective) that are more culturally distant than Japanese: Other Austronesian languages including Tagalog and Malay/Indonesian. (and many others, but fewer speakers)