Yeah, I went to a frozen yogurt place and scraped together enough Japanese to ask if there was an English speaker. They brought before me the store manager, a 22-year-old girl fresh out of college who'd spent a year in California as an exchange student and was super over the moon to be speaking to a real American once again. It was super cute, and we just stood there and talked about random stuff for several minutes before I realized I still wanted frozen yogurt and didn't know how to operate the machines or pay for my order.

I did the same thing and seized any opportunity to practice. I spent a lot of evenings that vacation in bars, just speaking to locals so I could git gud enough in Japanese to... function at a basic level there. I think I gained more Japanese language levels during those two weeks than I did my three semesters of collegiate study of the language.

It's lovely to visit, but unless Rakuten or Nintendo or somebody offered me a too-good-to-pass-up career opportunity, I couldn't foresee myself living in Japan. It's pricey, and as a white dude I would always be seen as an outsider (the literal translation of gaijin) with attendant social disadvantages: I couldn't live or work in certain places, more paperwork and bureaucratic hoops I'd need to jump through, the funny looks and people hiding from me (not so much a problem in Osaka but I hear it happens in Tokyo a lot).

Oh, you know those radio DJ booths in Splatoon where you can look through the plate glass and see the hostesses making their broadcast? Those are actual things in Japan. I passed by one in Doutonbori and the radio hosts started making remarks about the funny foreigner. Yay.