Well programmers tend to be into video games, and at least for a while all the best video games came out of Japan, so that helped. Between that and anime I really wanted to learn Japanese, and took two semesters of it in college.
I even worked for a Japanese game publisher for a while (in their small US office, they originally invited me in to discuss maybe publishing a game I was developing that they spotted at Microsoft's XNAFest).
Spoke some Japanese phrases that everyone in the office did while there "Ohayoo gozaimasu!(good morning, as you arrive) Tadaima!(i've returned, said when you come back to the office, like after getting food or coffee) Shitsurei shimasu.(sorry for interrupting, say before enter someone else's office) Itadakimasu!(common saying before eating lunch, which we always did together) Hai, wakarimashita.(yes, i understand) Mmm, umai.(mmm, that food is tasty) Aa, so so so.(yes, i agree) Doozo.(please, go ahead)" are some of the most common examples I can remember from over a decade ago.
I also sat in some teleconference meetings conducted in Japanese with the parent company in Japan (I was pretty quiet, mostly just tried to follow general concepts and wrote down words I heard I was curious about to look up later). Even got to the point where I started saying 'Hai' instead of yes around others for a while, out of habit.
I'm guilty of this as well haha. Not saying it in a negative vibe.
I lived in Japan for two years, and even tried to build an over-engineered learning tool (built a short roguelike version of Shortstraw algo to learn Kanji in Unity).
Fastest learning was in going to bars and talking to people when I lived there. Normal spoken Japanese is much more casual than textbooks. There is an introverted component to learning to read (drilling kanji, etc). that probably lends to a lot of tech solutions.
> Fastest learning was in going to bars and talking to people when I lived there.
Live in Japan close to 10 years. Went there speaking basically nothing, left speaking fluently.
In my experience, bars are 100% the best way to learn. If bars aren't your thing, social situations are good, but a little bit of booze has a great way of making you not care about making mistakes.
I don't think it's necessarily limited to video games.
Japan simply has so many strong otaku (original meaning) subcultures to nerd on, anime/manga/game being the obvious ones (to be more accurate, manga in Japan isn't really a "sub"-culture, but the otaku portion of it is big enough on its own).
The only things I can think of that are comparable in the Western world are Star Wars or Sci-Fi in general, and Superhero comics. But I'm not super familiar with Western cultures.
I even worked for a Japanese game publisher for a while (in their small US office, they originally invited me in to discuss maybe publishing a game I was developing that they spotted at Microsoft's XNAFest).
Spoke some Japanese phrases that everyone in the office did while there "Ohayoo gozaimasu!(good morning, as you arrive) Tadaima!(i've returned, said when you come back to the office, like after getting food or coffee) Shitsurei shimasu.(sorry for interrupting, say before enter someone else's office) Itadakimasu!(common saying before eating lunch, which we always did together) Hai, wakarimashita.(yes, i understand) Mmm, umai.(mmm, that food is tasty) Aa, so so so.(yes, i agree) Doozo.(please, go ahead)" are some of the most common examples I can remember from over a decade ago.
I also sat in some teleconference meetings conducted in Japanese with the parent company in Japan (I was pretty quiet, mostly just tried to follow general concepts and wrote down words I heard I was curious about to look up later). Even got to the point where I started saying 'Hai' instead of yes around others for a while, out of habit.