Location and local results are separate settings so that you can have global results without changing location. In case of pizza you will probably want to narrow down your search to city instead of country. Pretty sure it's impossible to break japanese search, when I search for ドミノ ピザ dominos.jp is the first result.
I consider that a feature. I really do not want my search results to depend on where in the world I am searching from. If I am looking for something regional, I can always add country name or "site:XX" to the keywords. But ultimately it is me who decides that I want a regional result.
This works rather well with DDG (I've been a happy DDG user for many years now).
On the other hand, I understand that I'm probably a minority in this, most people just want their search engine to essentially read their minds and they do not want to think about it too much.
Sorry, I actually meant "with Japan selected", I also appreciated to be able to choose rather than it being automated, but now it does not seem to work anymore.
Before, I was getting proper localized results. Even searching in Japan with English keywords gave me Japanese results.
Nowadays when I search even for simple things it does not work. If I look for "dominos pizza" in Japan, I get:
dominos.com
allmenuprice.com
dominosaruba.com
dominospanama.com
dominos.ca
dominos.com.au
dominos.co.in
dominos.co.nz
...
And it goes on and on with multiples pages, but I have to go to Google to actually get dominos.jp