How can I import a VMDK disk image to an AWS EC2 t2.micro instance on us-east-1e region using an S3 bucket on us-east-1?
So, first: regions like us-east-1 contain availability zones like us-east-1e. S3 operates in terms of regions, whereas many EC2 concepts (including VPC subnets and reserved instances) are specifically concerned with availability zones.
The ec2-import-instance documentation shows how to specify both a region and an availability zone. Try --region us-east-1 --availability-zone us-east-1e.