Thanks for the info! I went to Japan once before for a highschool exchange trip, and while I didn't really get to talk in Japanese at all, I got told "nihongo jouzu" for reading a few hiragana, and people seemed surprised that a foreigner knew any Japanese or anything about the country, haha. I was more surprised that Japan has so many popular cultural exports, and is one of the most popular countries for westerners to visit and learn the language of, but the people I met almost acted like Japan was some irrelevant little backwater. In fact, a relative of my host buddy told me I should've learnt German (the alternate language in my school) instead!

Honestly, I’m one of those people who shares the sentiment of the locals you met. Not to be a Debbie Downer, but a lot of Japanese people feel pessimistic about the country's future for a few realistic reasons. First, we are facing a severe demographic crisis with a declining birthrate and a rapidly aging population. Economically, our nominal GDP per capita dropped to 38th in the world as of 2025, and our government debt-to-GDP ratio is sitting at around 235%, which is by far the worst among major developed nations. Furthermore, we are dealing with intense geopolitical risks given our proximity to China, Russia, and North Korea. So, while we are incredibly happy and grateful that people love our culture and want to visit, the reality of living here comes with a lot of underlying anxiety. That relative probably just felt that a language tied to a stronger economic region might serve you better in the long run.

Ah well, to be honest I think most every country in the world is in that state now haha. Australia also has a bad economy, with majorly increasing homelessness and unemployment, worsening school outcomes, and our whole economy being propped up by mining, meat exports, and a service industry less and less people can afford to pay for. On top of that, our leaders are wishy-washy losers who mindlessly obey our historical ally, America, who only wants to rip us off by taking our resources for free, and drag us into more unethical wars just so they can get more oil. And we have the declining birthrate, housing crisis, cost-of-living crisis, and severe lack of teachers and medical workers that the whole developed world seems to be suffering. I have citizenship for an EU country, but my family live in three of the most impoverished and war-threatened parts of Europe, and I'm not sure places like Sweden and Germany are much better than Australia (especially without being a fluent speaker of their language). I'm not sure if it's unfair to say, but English seems to be the lingua franca of the world, and job-wise the languages that'd be useful in my area (Chinese, Arabic, south-east Asian languages) are already spoken by lots of bilingual immigrants, so there isn't a practical reason to learn another language-- just the personal ones of family, friends or fun. And in terms of 'street cred', so to speak, Japanese is the language that will most often get you the reaction of "wow that's so cool!", and you get to be the nerd who explains some nuance in a Ghibli movie that the English subtitles didn't capture haha :P