I'm an American, native English speaker, no real other languages at a conversational level other than some High-School Spanish and a couple hundred words of Kor

I'm an American, native English speaker, no real other languages at a conversational level other than some High-School Spanish and a couple hundred words of Korean due to marriage. The further you get away from areas with familiar scripts, language cognates, and speakers, the more lost one can feel very quickly. Parts of Hungary, for example, were quite difficult even though they use Latin script, are European, and usually have lots of English speakers around. One of the things I found that made Japan remarkable was how easy it was to get around as a non-Japanese speaker. Until you end up off the mainline tourist bits, then things can get quickly pretty dicey. I don't think the inverse is true for the average Japanese person in even the most tourist friendly spots elsewhere. Everywhere is opaque, and there aren't enough Japanese speaking tourists to make it worthwhile to add it to all of the signage and menus to make it work out.