I think its worth adding some additional phonetic context around this remark (I made a similar remark and my coworkers thought I was making a racist joke).
The reason native Japanese speakers struggle with "R" and "L" sounds is because they just have one phoneme to work with, which sounds (to a native English speaker) like a combination of "R", "L", and "D". If you aren't exposed to phonemes at a young age, it is difficult to expand your set later in life.
An analogous difficulty might exist for English speakers if a Chinese company came up with two product names which used the exact same sequence of syllables, but had "tonal" differences in pronunciation.
Similarly for Japanese, "file" is pronounced/written as "fairu" and "fire" as "faiyaa". If the service docs are translated, then they would look like (and sound as) difference names.
The reason native Japanese speakers struggle with "R" and "L" sounds is because they just have one phoneme to work with, which sounds (to a native English speaker) like a combination of "R", "L", and "D". If you aren't exposed to phonemes at a young age, it is difficult to expand your set later in life.
An analogous difficulty might exist for English speakers if a Chinese company came up with two product names which used the exact same sequence of syllables, but had "tonal" differences in pronunciation.