I recently came back from a short trip (just 1 week!) in Japan, and I felt like that, in general, the confidence in my Japanese ability skyrocketed immensely from that trip alone. I don’t have many other friends who are learning nor speak Japanese, so I wanted to share my experience here in the off chance that it happens to be useful or interesting for other fellow Japanese language learners 
Background with Japanese
I took about 1 year of Japanese classes in college - which at this point, was about 8-9 years ago. I would say it barely got me to N5 level. The following summer, I did a study abroad in Japan for 1 month, living with a homestay family during that time. In retrospect, I felt like I squandered that opportunity because I had ZERO confidence in my ability to communicate, so instead of engaging with them in Japanese, I opted to just spend all of time with the other Americans in my study abroad cohort. Back then, trying to do basic everyday stuff in Japanese like ordering food, asking for directions, purchasing things in stores, was incredibly difficult, and from my memory, using English with the locals was not as easy compared to what I experienced from this most recent trip.
After that, I dropped my Japanese studies completely because I was frustrated with my perceived lack of progress, difficulty with studying grammar and the staggering amount of kanji to learn. It was only about 2 or 2.5 years ago that I picked up Japanese seriously again using Wanikani.
My current study program consists of primarily doing reviews with Wanikani and consuming native content, occasionally posting on Hellotalk if I want to practice writing. I look up words and grammar points as needed, but in general I try to keep it simple.
Using Japanese in Japan
Since I had been studying more seriously for the last 2 or 3 years, I think I came to Japan with a stronger foundation that last time. What really surprised me was how much more I was able to convey using simpler words and grammatical structures. The most memorable interactions I had with locals was by using the simplest constructions possible to convey what I wanted to say. Being exposed to Japanese constantly for a week did wonders for my listening and reading comprehension, so I imagine that visiting for longer would help even more.
There were of course, times where I could not understand anything the other person was saying, or I could not come up with the words to answer what someone was asking, or I used a word incorrectly but those experiences were still valuable (if not a little embarrassing).
I am proud to say that I did become very good at clearly hearing 「袋をご利用ですか」and other customer service based phrases from those fast speaking clerks!
Reflections on learning Japanese
This is likely my own personal problem - and I bet that if I’ve experienced it, then I’m sure others may also experience it - but I had felt that I don’t speak or sound exactly like a native Japanese speaker, then I’m not allowed to claim that I can speak Japanese.
For some reason, at times it feels like the Japanese language learning community really gives off this energy of “if you don’t sound native you don’t speak Japanese” or something like that. In some ways I felt like I internalized that to a negative degree. Again, it’s my own personal problem for internalizing it and not managing my own relationship to learning Japanese.
In retrospect, I think embracing my foreignness probably did a lot more for improving my Japanese ability than studying the language itself. It felt that when I embraced that this is not my native language or that I may not ever sound fully Japanese, the realization that I could still communicate what I want in the majority of situations gave me a lot of confidence to still try and use it anyway.
Where to go from here?
For me, I think I’ll continue keeping the general plan of using Wanikani until I hit Guru on all Level 60 items. I think if I want to see continued growth in my language ability, it definitely seems like the way forward is to engage more with natives and content for natives. I’m riding a really strong wave of motivation so I’m excited to see where my language ability might be once I hit Level 60 here on Wanikani.
Especially the doctors here expecting me to understand every medical word after me saying something like ”喉が痛い” xD