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My hot take is that the Japanese language is not quite as exotic as English-speaking Japanese learners make it out to be. It's still >4x as much work as picking up a Germanic or Romance language, but a lot of that additional work is front-loaded (hence an overwhelming number of people who never made it past the beginner stage and can only talk about how hard it is).
Yes, there is a lot of culturally-determined social subtext, but most of it is just using set phrases to express something you're already conveying with rather universal body, vocal tone, or facial expression cues. Also, a lot of this exists to an extent in English as well. "How are you?" is usually not an invitation to give a detailed update. "Next time, for sure" more often than not precedes a ghosting. We're plenty equipped to pick up on the analogous cues for Japanese with a little exposure or the right finessing of the translation wording.
The honorifics seem exotic and they give indications of the social dynamics in a conversation, but they are definitionally quite regular and rigid. Translations inevitably lose a lot of this, but you're just losing that particular feature uniformly across every text. If I were to hypothesize about why this isn't a huge impediment to foreign enjoyment, I'd posit that it has minimal role in the types of Japanese stories that foreigners find engaging, with most involving interactions between characters of shared social status. Japanese workplace dramas where these things may be more important have nearly zero attention from Western audiences. Shonen anime, one of the larger cultural exports, essentially throws honorifics out of the window. You don't need the specific Japanese first person pronoun used by an anime character to know if that person is fussy or tomboyish or rash or timid. 99/100 you'd guess correctly from their character design alone.
Regardless, a decent chunk of the features that make a given piece of Japanese prose "punchy" still seem to carry over into English. This seems less true for Mandarin. If I were to vaguely gesture at why, it would involve the idea that a larger percentage of Chinese speech feels idiomatic. After all, idioms are the extreme of densely-packed connotation. To explain the ways that hearing a character say "He kicked the bucket." differs from just "He died." would take an essay. To me, Chinese seems to use a greater variety and frequency of such idiomatic phrases in way that affects the visceral impact of more of its sentences, which cumulatively impacts the perception of a given work as a whole.
Right, a lot of people latch onto pronouns, honorifics, politeness levels, etc when talking about how exotic the language is. And those are legitimate differences that are prone to getting lost in translation. But I don't think those things are what makes Japanese difficult to translate.
It has a lot of grammatical constructions (topic/subject markers, verb forms to indicate oddly specific things like an action being done as a favor for someone else, an action being done in preparation for something else, etc) that simply don't exist in English, and thus get flattened out in any translation (this goes both ways of course -- Japanese lacks a future tense, and it lacks articles as well).
It's elliptical to the point that the translator often has to add multiple new words just to get a grammatically correct English sentence, and different translators won't always agree on these hidden context-dependent words.
It's funny that you mention the "punchiness" of Japanese prose, because I think it's actually a rather un-punchy language. The number of words and phrases that Japanese speakers use on a regular basis is simply more restricted than what we have in English, and a perfectly literal translation of Japanese text can come off as subdued, repetitive, and stilted to English ears; translators often feel it necessary to "spice up" the text a bit in order to reach the level of variety that's culturally expected in English writing.
None of this is to say that Japanese is "hard" per se, only that it is legitimately quite different from European languages and the text requires some massaging before you get something that reads naturally in English.
This line of reasoning kind of makes me think of an objection I always have to people wanting to use "safe"/garbage-collected programming languages like Javascript or Golang instead of C/C++, because "explicit memory management makes it hard to write correct code, and your program will crash with null pointer errors": bad programmers are going to write bad code, the only difference is that with C their bad code will crash right away, while in a GCed language their bad code will instead live to leak memory and contain subtle logic errors that you won't notice until it's too late.
As I see it, translating perfectly requires emulating the intention and mental state of the original author/speaker in full, and then leveraging your language skill in the target language to convey the intention as the author did in the source language. If you skip this step and translate by following the structure of the original text, be it word for word, idiom for idiom or sentence for sentence, your translation will actually be flawed - it's just that if the two languages were similar, the flaws will be less apparent, and you can go on for longer before the fraud (that the translator did not actually understand, but just chinese-roomed the translation) is detected.
I think this goes both ways, too. The context-dropping nature of Japanese means that if you actually communicate the context in it that an English speaker would habitually want to convey, you also wind up with something repetitive and stilted - but if you drop the wrong piece of context, you also get something that is between jarring and incomprehensible. A big part of Japanese fluency is knowing what context to provide with what timing, and how to play the language's much greater (compared to English) dynamic range from absolute minimalism to byzantine circumscription.
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I'd overall agree with you here. I mainly meant that, when it is punchy (by which I meant vaguely emotionally resonant), the way it does so is more often translatable to English in a way that I don't find to be the case for many Chinese texts.
It might be my love/hate relationship with purple prose, but I think the Chinese language excels at flowery descriptions.
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