I think a big part is that Japanese is a lot easier to pronounce for westerners. We won't get it fully right but there are no tones and it transliterates to English pretty well, compared to pretty much every other Asian country.

    > Idk how to even properly pronounce that. 

And there's your reason why we say dumplings and not xiao long bao! :)

The "X" in general is like a "chi" with a lisp.