Also we should not forget the history of the MSX platform that is tied to the ASCII Corp. in Tokyo. It was an early 80s startup led by Kazuhiko Nishi who licensed MS Basic and introduced MS products to Japan for the first time. Later it became the de facto Basic standard for the MSX platform that kind of dominated personal computing in the 80s (similar to how Commodore and Spectrum dominated that market in Europe during the same time).

There is this cute photo of Nishi-san posing next to the young Bill Gates:

https://ozeidi.wordpress.com/2015/10/10/my-first-personal-co...

This gives a good overview on Ascii Corp: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII_Corporation