I’d have to learn Welsh, too. The last thing I want is both the Welsh AND the Irish after me. That doesn’t even count the continental languages I’d have to learn. 
Luckily, I’m white-bread American, so nobody expects me to know another language. And seeing how I honestly have no skill for them whatsoever, I’m just dedicated to learning English to the best of my ability instead.
FUCK.
Like most said, you shouldn’t be concerned about the comments. Those people live in a fantasy world where stereotypes are real and the world revolves around whatever shit Disney channel cartoon they grew up watching.
You shouldn’t feel obligated to learn a language just because it is part of your ethnicity/cultural background. You should learn languages that are either functional to your current location or are of interest to you in whatever way (in your case Japanese). It was mentioned before, but North America is practically built upon immigrants. How many people of Germany descent in USA actually speak German? French? Ukrainian? I’m sure there are some but how about the younger generation.
I fall into this myself as I am half French. My father doesn’t even know French so I never learnt it in the household. Now since I have a French last name some people are surprised when I tell them “non, je ne parle pas francais”.
Learning other languages is a waste of time unless those languages are programming languages. Of course this is an opinion.
But then each country would live in its own shell, common cultural traits would be rarer by far, global trading (economic or cultural) would be considerably more difficult and you’d never have played FF or learnt of the Norse mythology or Prof. Tolkien’s Mix-and-Grill.
Gila-monstre?
To be fair, it’s not like Wales wants attention. They’re perfectly content to be ruled by England.
My dumbass redneck cousin from Cousin who is like 25 and already has 4 kids moved his family to Arizona or New Mexico (I forgot which one) for a new job last year. Anyway spanish is a mandatory class for ALL kids wherever he moved, and he was so angered that his children would learn to speak a different language from English he moved his family back to hickville colorado and now lives on food stamps and welfare. That’s my spanish story.
This reminds me of why I don’t miss FFXI. Fucking racists. Get invited to a JP party, I’m rolling with 30M+ worth of gear:
(Money) (NA) (I don’t have anything to give you) from another THF in the party with horrible gear.
Lockejv: “EN ONRY”
/disband
Stupid fucks.
I’m in this boat, until people learn that I’m from San Diego and then folks seem the think that for some reason that I shouldhave learned it by diffusion due to proximatey to Mexico. Of course, I’m horrible at languages, so even though I took Spanish in high school, I know nada. [[ わたしは日本語を 話します。]]
Edit: Oh yeah, I wouldn’t let it bother me if I were you. But if it did, I would probably prepare a number of retorts for the next time it happened ranging from sarcasm, to blunt rudeness, to messing with them about how their speaking the language wrong (ie. "It’s pronounced ‘Yo Ha-bro In-gloss’, not ‘Yo A-blo In-gles’ ~~ Only more linguistically in depth).