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In my experience the trick seems to be that they all have been through plenty of English classes in school, but with transliterations of words into katakana as training wheels. So often if you struggle to communicate, you can just try wrangling the words into the closest fit kana syllables you can think of (i.e. engrish) and it gets through perfectly. Though I saw some memes more recently complaining about how this is bigoted and insulting to do, so YMMV. I exchange studied there for an year, got great language practice for most of it since communicating anything was inept clumsy Japanese or bust, then toward the end of the year this clicked for me and I started getting through in English as well.
Peak Japanese internationalism I've seen was a technical conference where Japanese grad students gave a talk in English, legible but clearly thoroughly rehearsed. Then for audience questions their professor had to pitch in and translate for them. And finally another Japanese professor tried asking a question (in English), the first prof couldn't parse him, and the three parties had to switch entirely to Japanese to get through.
Agreed that the insulation must be a pretty great thing on net. And, like, probably those references to English or Christianity or anything Western that are pure style and garbled substance, are kind of evenly matched by equally garbled style-only weeaboo references to things Japanese in Western pop culture. They just are the rare nation that manages to produce enough Civ culture points to go tit for tat on it :D.
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