Maybe. But prior to visiting Japan I actually studied Japanese for 5 years and after visiting it I stopped and quickly forgot whatever I learned as I simply did

Maybe. But prior to visiting Japan I actually studied Japanese for 5 years and after visiting it I stopped and quickly forgot whatever I learned as I simply didn't have any reason to as whatever I wanted to find wasn't there (I guess I was looking for a sci-fi wonderland full of robots or something, instead found tired uninterested people everywhere). Wrt Brazil folks, there was no power dynamics between us, they didn't see any $ from me as they were from fairly well-off families, just the society was much more open than the Japanese one. It felt more like Germany where colleagues working at the same desk together for 20 years still use formal polite speech to address each other.