Been looking into more of the MK situation in Japan since it came up again. MK1-MK3 were the only ones released, though Deception had a big tournament where a bunch of Japanese players fought a blind American and they got bodied by him. It's less that the series is outright "banned" but it'd take too much effort to localize it, since it's more than just dialogue that's changing but the Fatalites.
However, MK's supposedly a pretty popular game to import, and has it's fair share of fanart from Japan.
Some dude made a video about it. But the site that hosted the original art doesn't work any more.