VanishedOne: I tend to use the J rather literally: I wouldn't normally call a game a JRPG unless it actually originated in Japan.
Oddly enough, I don't use 'Cornish pasty' only where the pasty was made in Cornwall, even though Cornish pasties actually have a
Protected Geographical Indication.
Pica-Ludica: I had thought about applying the "J" literally, but such a classification has its faults. What do you make, for example, of a game like Dragon's Dogma? While developed by a Japanese company, it plays and feels like a western RPG (J-Rock intro song notwithstanding ;) ).
On the other side, what do you make of the many RPGs developed with the various RPG-Maker engines? Most of those projects are JRPGs in gameplay and style, even though they are not necessarily made by Japanese developers.
I was being a bit loose with the reference to geography: if a Japanese dev. team decided to go and set up their HQ in Antarctica, they could still produce a JRPG, while a bunch of Englishmen couldn't make a JRPG just by making their RPG in Tokyo. So okay, I'm not
that literal; or rather, I understand the J to refer to a nation's cultural milieu.
I'm not comfortable attaching a national tag to something from a different country of origin, as though a game's cultural identity were just a matter of certain enumerable stylistic traits. So a Western JRPG-style game I'd call a JRPG-style game. A Japanese-made CRPG is a CRPG (or WRPG-style game) which, though an RPG made in Japan, is overtly adopting Western traditions in RPG-making over Japanese.
It isn't
neat - in fact, it's still pretty arbitrary - but it makes at least as much sense as 'Metroidvania'. ^_^
The real fun comes when you work with the scholarship on 'cultural appropriation' and the identity conditions for categories like 'Indigenous art'.