For instance, “Dragon Ball Z” is “Doragon Bōru Zetto” which is obviously the same thing, with Zetto I imagine being a Japanized version of Z, pronounced “Zed” in a lot of places in the world, from the original Greek letter Zeta. Milk is another one, where it’s “Miruku”. What were the Japanese words for Dragon, Ball, and Milk before they interacted with the English language, and why do they not use them anymore? Surely they had milk-producing livestock, maybe had ball-shaped toys in their history, and absolutely they have the eastern-style dragons going back a long time. What’s the deal? Did occupying Allied forces in the aftermath of WW2 just use English words for a lot of things and they caught on among Japanese people? Or do they consider English words to be cool and exotic, and used them to help promote Dragon Ball Z, and sell milk, among other uses of Japanized English words?
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Dragon – 竜
Ball – 玉/球
Milk – 牛乳
And all these words are still commonly used everywhere, they haven’t disappeared.
Dragonball uses English to just because it sounds cool and katakana is stands out.
English does the exact same thing. We have a bunch of French loan words that we use alongside English words.
As a hafu who grew up in Japan, I can tell you a couple of things about English words being used in Japan. Japanese have a fascination with all things English (or Engrish) because to them, it’s exotic and COOL. You mentioned Dragon Ball Z, but what about Bleach? It’s a cleaning agent which has nothing to do with what the manga/anime is about, so why Bleach?
English is also misused/abused/used on clothing/products/signs (pretty much everywhere) because it “looks” and “sounds” cool. It doesn’t have to make sense either. I have seen shirts that read: Enjoy Happy Today. There was a used clothing store in the shinjuku area named “F*cking” w/o the * and using the U. Only one of the managers knew what the word was and meant. One of the best selling electrolyte sports drinks sold in Japan/Asia is Pocari Sweat. I introduced it to my non-Asian friends and they got weirded out at first. Japanese use of English is kind of like when non-Asian people get Kanji tattoos without knowing what/how/where the Kanji would actually be used and what is actually means they just want it because it ‘looks’ cool.