Do you remember Famicom-to-NES adapters? This was c. 1986 technology. It allowed you to play many Famicom games on NES. Probably just a pin-out adapter, but it opened up a ton of games for those of us in the US.
In this case, I only ever had one Famicom game, The Goonies. It was extremely close to the arcade version. The reason I had access to Japanese titles at all was because my first job was at a used video game store.
As you can see from the last two pictures, in order to extract the game from a standard NES, you had to use the ribbon. Later adapters would "embed" the Famicom cartridge in an NES-shaped outer shell, which was also a neat innovation.