As one of my Chinese friends in grad school put it: he could kind of understand written Japanese but had no idea what was going on with “those weird characters everywhere.”

Lol true. I read the 死 character in a bunch of weird symbols and suddenly the entire message looks so omnious as if its a threat.

Surprisingly, I looked up "Japan"s wikipedia in Japanese, and some parts are quite readable to me like this:

They all look familar, as in, it doesn't look foreign to me, because they are almost all just Chinese, except the weird "@" looking symbol. But unfortunate I never made it past 2nd grade before emigrating so I don't know how to pronounce the names lol. I know the positions like 天皇, but idk how to pronounce the names of the actual people because they contain characters I never learned.

Then there's some parts looking like this:

I have no idea what most of it is, looks very strange and "foreign" to me, except those few blocky characters that are chinese... I mean, I can make out what it roughtly says based on those few chinese characters: Japan Country ... east... location ... country ... area ... population... island nation ... 4 island ... 6th in the world ... economy ... [etc...]; like I can read a few characters every so often, everything else, those characters that are curvy and round looks "broken" to me. Like lol when I was a kid, I saw those "broken" characters amd I thought there was a glitch/bug in the electronic device (was messing around with settings and language menu).