The writing system isn't that big a deal. For daily life, it's more important to be able to converse in basic/conversational Japanese, not to be able to read literature, and you don't have to read kanji to talk to people. Just learning katakana is enough to read all the foreign loanwords (which are everywhere these days), and knowing hiragana + some basic kanji is really plenty to get by. For reading anything more difficult, just use Google Translate's camera ("Lens") function.

You’re correct, but as a foreigner that lived in Japan for 3 months, it gets very old constantly having to use google lens or translate just to go grocery shopping. In most European countries, people will know a tiny bit of broken English at least, and most of the words you can figure out on packages/signs by their roots.

I loved living in Japan, but even where I lived in Shinagawa, it was very rare finding someone with any English skills at all unless they were young and college educated in the states.

>In most European countries, people will know a tiny bit of broken English at least, and most of the words you can figure out on packages/signs by their roots.

I mean, what do you expect? European languages are all related to each other, so of course it's easier to figure things out by roots. Japanese isn't even remotely related to English, except through borrow-words. That said, I'm usually able to figure a lot of things out by simply reading the katakana, since 95% of the time it's just a borrowed English word. Of course, this depends a lot on what you're looking at: western foods almost always use katakana borrow-words, Asian foods almost never.

> European languages are all related to each other, so of course it's easier to figure things out by roots.

I guess you have never visited Finland, Estonia or Hungary...

I strongly disagree. Yes, speaking is more important than reading, but being illiterate in a modern society is not fun. And as the other comment said, having to use your phone all the time gets old really fast.