I wager the same reason a lot of comic books reference japanese culture or style in some form: they revolutionized comic illustration and printing technology for the modern era.

The USA had a similar effect on Television, movies, and radio broadcasts.

If tomorrow India invented a Neutron Teleportation based communication technology and used it to broadcast media to a receiver through the crust of the earth faster than sattelite, then whatever media they broadcast in the beginning would likely have longlasting impacts on culture everywhere.