(Eye Roll Trope) White guy with a Japanese Soul

Sometimes the trope is used well to actually highlight character growth and move a plot forward. Other times it's used in cringe inducing ways to give character weight they don't necessarily deserve.

Sogun(1980 miniseries) - John Blackthorne is a English Navigator who gets stranded and imprisoned in Japan. In order to survive he must learn and adapt Japanese culture and navigate the politics and war in 16th century Japan. For western audiences it introduced a interesting historical perspective of period that they may not have been familiar with.

The Last Samurai(2003) - Tom Cruise plays Nathan Algren who goes to Japan during the civil war era and introduces the Japanese to firearms while in the process integrating himself into Japanese culture. I personally felt this ended up bordering on white savior tropes more and not being a huge Tom Cruise fan definitly rolled my eyes on this one.

Altered Carbon(Season 1) - Takeshi Kovacs is an elite Japanese mercenary and revolutionary who is resurrected int he body of Joel Kinnaman, a white actor. While S1 of the show is wildly praised for it's complex world building and plot it still fulfills this trope by having a white guy with a Japanese soul being the main protagonist. While I enjoyed the show, I did eye roll at the use of this trope because it felt like the choice to use a Japanese actor was done simply to add spiritual weight to the main character and tokenizing the original actors contribution.

Nihon no omokage(1984) - In researching this trope I found another example which I have admittedly not watched, but appears to fulfil the requirements. Based on a real life story of Lafcadio Hearn, a Greek/Irish reporter who moved to Japan during the early 19'th century life and became a teacher, translator, and documented Japans struggles with adapting it's culture to western modernization. Hearn was apparently well respected in Japan and even has a museum dedicated to his writings.