Things you were surprised were Big in Japan???
Amused by this Japanese poster for The Backrooms, with a blurb from Hideo Kojima describing it as "a liminal space version of CUBE". The cult of CUBE was one of the first big-in-Japan phenomena to mystify me after doing some research. People who've never seen Star Wars have seen CUBE. Some have even seen CUBE 2: Hypercube.
Once you notice this, you can't unsee the film's impact on the culture. Every work of Japanese entertainment from the past 30 years in which people suddenly wake up trapped and/or are forced to compete in some deadly escape room-style contest owes a debt to CUBE (see last year's Exit 8, whose director is also blurbed on the poster, and Kojima's own PT). It's ironic when the influences circle their way back via things created after being inspired by the original source.
The other 2 pics are from Streets of Fire (1984), one of the other more well known examples of this. Bombed everywhere but Japan, where it went on to influence everything from Final Fight to Bubblegum Crisis.