I just have returned from a 13-day stay in Japan, during which I reached wanikani level 5. I was surprised that my very basic knowledge (wanikani + duolingo + kanji tree) sometimes helped me to decipher or guess parts of written texts.
The spoken language however was a total mystery - apart from ください and ありがとうございます. It was much too fast to understand anything.
Ooo, where’d you go? What did you do? Send us all the photos. 
I’m right there with you. Hit 15 right before a week in Japan and the listening is what killed. At level 15 I could understand and decipher quite a bit of the writing on signs. The strangest part was the China Eastern airline I used actually had some stuff written in Chinese that I could understand (not read, just get the gist of the meaning). I wasn’t expecting to be able to understand as much chinese writing as I was. My girlfriend, who hasn’t started the way of the Crabigator had a much easier time listening and understanding. (Which is an ability she acquired solely by watching anime). The part that tripped me up the most while listening was all the grammar that goes with the vocabulary. I’d catch words here and there, but the rest just blew right past me.
Also, what part of Japan were you in? When I visited Kumamoto some of the older people spoke a different dialect than I was used to from Terrace House and Anime.
We have taken an organized tour from Tokyo to Nikko, Kamakura, Matsumoto, Nagano, Takayama, Kyoto, Nara, Hiroshima and Osaka. My understanding of the spoken language was too bad to notice dialect differences.
I would have sent you a link to my photos in a private message, but unfortunately I just learnt that this is not possible in this forum. After all, someone who has reached level 60 must be a trustworthy person ;-).
I am not sure whether it is allowed to publish such a link for all to see.
Unfortunately, private messaging was disabled because certain individuals were misusuing it (though I wonder if it’s been long enough ago that we could maybe have it back…)
If you’ve got no issues with sharing a link in the clear, there’s no rule against it. Otherwise I can provide a (temporary) e-mail address you could send it to. 
Well, here are my 700+ photos in 9 albums.
Ah, nice.
Looks like you arrived the day before I left - perhaps we passed each other in the street without knowing.
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