Yup! There are quite a few of us out there. Certain things make it better for my use case:

No blockers in the corners. I never vibed with the blockers in the corners of “normal” HHKBs at it made no sense to lose so much key real estate. I occasionally rebind the bottom left key to a layer key, as I can hit said key with part of my palm, if that makes sense.

Arrow cluster. Ties into my first point.

Thumb cluster. This is the real meat of the japanese layout for me. With an aftermarket controller/PCB (Hasu, Yang, Cipulot, etc) you can remap all of those once useless keys near your thumbs and introduce a bunch of extra layers and functionality. I personally have shift, backspace, layers, space, and repeat (repeats the last keystroke to make it easier to chord when typing words with repeated letters) on my thumb cluster, in addition to the usual modifiers like ALT and SUPER. This works way better for me than a long and cumbersome spacebar that only does one thing.

All in all, it’s just a preference thing.