Japanese is one of the easiest Asian languages to learn. It's not tonal (Chinese is tonal). The non-Kanji (Chinese characters) part of the writing is phonetic like Western languages (just learn the sounds of the characters and pronounce together like an Alphabet). There is the romaji system which means you can take Japanese words and spell them or read them phonetically which means that Westerners can learn spoken and written language with an alphabet like system and don't have to learn Chinese characters.
The sounds and pronunciation are very friendly to your typical western sounds and distinct and easy to pick up (again, the non-tonal) by ear. Many Japanese terms are taken from Western words. There is an easy to learn and comprehensive romanization system (Japanese words written in Latin character set) that doesn't have much variation (in comparison to other Asian languages).
Japanese is interesting to learn but why are you learning it? A lot of people seem to want to learn Japanese for entertainment/pop culture reasons and there's nothing wrong with that, but that seems to be a big part of the trend.
In today's world, one of the more major Asian languages to try to learn is probably Mandarin which I keep telling myself I will do but never get around to doing.
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