The below is wrong, check the edit

Except no, they couldn’t because of the Berne Convention which the US and Japan are both signatories on. Google complies with Japanese copyright in the US because they are required to by law. Again, complaining about the wrong thing is ineffectual, if you want change then you need to be informed enough to understand what needs to be changed in the first place.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention

It also enforces a requirement that countries recognize rights held by the citizens of all other parties to the convention

Edit: Actually this is an interesting nuance I wasn’t aware of, so I was wrong. Sorry! I need to take my own advice more often. But there’s an interesting distribution to learn about here.

The copyright itself is applicable in US jurisdiction regardless of what country it came from, but then the claim itself is enforced with the US’s copyright laws(and there are some weird gray areas about public domain timelines expiring at different times). So Google certainly could ignore it outside of Japan.