I had a few encounters with young Japanese girls (nothing immoral). Japanese kids are shy (like all kids), but also very forward (unlike most of the adults when they're not drunk). One hebe on a school trip to one of the tourist attractions I was in said "I love you" to me because she probably didn't know any other English words, and her friends teased her about it while laughing and trying to say random English things to me. It was very heart-warming.

About the size thing. Buildings are extremely size-efficient, and everything seems shrinked down or packed tightly. Even in rural towns. You see it in media, but when you are in front of it IRL, it feels weird. Like you've stepped into a model. The aesthetic is similar to China's, but more compact.

The most uncanny experience was probably a maid cafe I went to just to see what it was like. This was a constant everywhere I went: you can see where the inspiration came from when you see these places in anime, but IRL it looks much more low-budget and shabbier. More real.
I did fall in love with the maid cafe girls, though. I only went to one, but despite their cutesy dumb act, you could tell they were very smart and quick-witted, despite probably being high school or university students. I expected something dumb, but I ended up feeling a lot of respect for them, which I didn't expect. You can tell they take what they do seriously. And the other patrons were mostly older men (lonely), and you could tell the girls totally understood the importance of their work. I ended up seeing it like a modern version of geishas. It's serious business. There were a couple of girls there too, and it didn't feel seedy at all.

I went to Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto and Hiroshima, plus a few very small rural towns. Hiroshima had a very "island" 90s short-haired long-skirted schoolgirl riding her bicycle in summertime kind of vibe, although everything was larger there because so much was reconstructed after the bomb and looked different/more western. I hope to visit an actual coastal town or one of the islands in the future.

The one place I felt at home was the second-hand shops and hobby shops full of otaku. Despite being an outsider there.

I tried to do everything I could think of: maid cafes, night life, onsen, rural ryokan, touristy stuff, going into working-class restaurants where they were very wary of me until I managed to get out a couple of sentences in Japanese... I stayed in hotels and in an appartment to try to pretend I lived there (but I was rich, because the living standards there are lower compared to my country). The default attitude towards westerners is being wary, but when they see you're not American, and you make an effort to speak the language, they relax. Especially in izakaya where the staff gets drunk with the patrons and the differences start to blur if you speak a bit of the language and you lubricate it all with alcohol. I had such an experience in Osaka, and it was fun. If you manage to step out of the dumb tourist stereotype, people are amiable. Only once did I come across a couple of gang types and their aura was scary as fuck.

IDK. This is all through my personal lens and I'm trying to make sense of it all. I packed so much in so little time that I'm still trying to integrate all of it. You can tell because this post is a mess of random things lol