Their education system is quite poorly suited to teaching a foreign language effectively (as with any other), but there is also this very low exposure to English (or any other foreign language) due to the abundance of translated material.

Not just translated, but presumably dubbed?

I have some eastern euro relatives that owe their English skill (moreso vocab than grammar) to local-language subtitled TV/movies (too poor to dub).

Just one of the many reasons subs are superior.

> I have some eastern euro relatives that owe their English skill (moreso vocab than grammar) to local-language subtitled TV/movies (too poor to dub).

Can confirm, it was the same for me and many of my peers when growing up (and video games for those that partook). However today everything is dubbed on TV, your only chance of subtitles to learn is on new releases in the cinemas.

I'm an American, native English speaker, no real other languages at a conversational level other than some High-School Spanish and a couple hundred words of Korean due to marriage. The further you get away from areas with familiar scripts, language cognates, and speakers, the more lost one can feel very quickly. Parts of Hungary, for example, were quite difficult even though they use Latin script, are European, and usually have lots of English speakers around.

One of the things I found that made Japan remarkable was how easy it was to get around as a non-Japanese speaker. Until you end up off the mainline tourist bits, then things can get quickly pretty dicey. I don't think the inverse is true for the average Japanese person in even the most tourist friendly spots elsewhere. Everywhere is opaque, and there aren't enough Japanese speaking tourists to make it worthwhile to add it to all of the signage and menus to make it work out.