I wonder if there's once some story of a non-Japanese rakugo master that went popular or something. There was this other series called Shinya Shokudō where one of the chapters is also about a foreign guy who met a rakugo master through a food incident, and became a rakugo apprentice.
In that other series it was an Italian guy who was invited to eat Napolitan spaghetti, then the Italian ended up apprenticing himself to a rakugo master he met at the diner, and later Napolitan spaghetti became one of his signature acts.