If the backlink profile is still fine, clean and worthy enough, Google doesn't store the archived content for obvious reasons except for some cache, and it's not clear they use it for positioning purposes, therefore it's safe to say that you could use them without many risks.
In fact I've been using it so far.
By the way
Nowadays it's easy to find both.
But it's true that Japanese is more prominent.
A lot of these sites have been "poorly abused": I think you should go a little further in the research that just staying in that. In fact this has provided me a lot of value, since a lot of people like you are rejecting them for the face value. But the previous owner just put some shitty 1 pager with 4 links because probably someone told him that it would be a real deal. The same as thousands of guys around that buy expired domains, use them for 1 or 2 years and leave the community to work in a different topic. Then we find their PBN and we reject them at first.
Really bad idea from my point of view, still great for me, I profit from this. And I find every month a little harder to find pure,clean and cheap domains. Most are not worth the buck, people paying $300+ for real "clean" shit.
