Should all Japanese directly address foreigners in Japanese ?

[lexico]

Welcome to the thread, epigene-san!
Of all the interesting things that you said in your first post, I find the following especially worthy of attention.

I almost never meet Westerners. Only those I meet are people I know through work (an environment where everyone is expected to be able to speak at least Japanese and English--so I speak either language and no one minds) and tourists with their eyes glued to maps, standing in the streets of Shinjuku...
I grew up seeing Americans (GIs) who never learned anything more than a few phrases in Japanese after several years or even decades of living in Japan...
I made acquaintance in the past with some married to Japanese, but their Japanese capabilities were limited. So, I ended up speaking English to avoid misunderstandings. I also felt that they would feel their limitations in communicating in Japanese and become embarrassed.

Does everyone mean every Japanese, or both Japanese and foreigners?
From interacting with the few foreigners you'd met or seen thru work, those tourists in Shinjuku, the American GI's, and those married to Japanese, few of them spoke much Japanese, and none like Maciamo or PachiPro. (correct?)

If that was the case, the Japanese are not to be blamed for having the preconception that Japanese is indeed hard to learn, and that Westerners are genuinely handicapped when learning Japanese.

Now this is in comparison to the learned Japanese who were able to accomplish the highly difficult task of culturally assimilating most Western notions either as phonetic loans (normally written in katakana) or calques via classical kanji more than a hundred years ago.
Back then, the Japanese cultural elite learned everything they could about the West, including the Western languages.

But Westerners in general ignored the importance of learning Japanese. (true?)
Then who should be considered superior, just looking at the language situation ?
(historically, in the 1860's-1900's for example)
In other words, Westerners brought it upon themselves in a way; they inherited the sins of their forefathers !
Do you think this kind of explanation is far-fetched ?
But then, why didn't these Westerners not learn Japanese when they had the chance ???
Do you think Westerners at some point in time felt vastly superior to the Japanese (or Asians) in general, and because of it considered the Japanese tongue unworthy of learning ?

and Japanese so hung up on their inferiority of not being able to speak English.

Do you think this feeling of "inferiority" can also be the result of losing WWII ?
(in all the possible connotations of this negative history from the Japanese' view)

Is it possible that this "feeling inferior" came first, and then the "language block" came about as a result of it ?
Again, do you think I am overly stretching my imagination ?
Just wanted to ask you these troubling questions to get it off my chest.

EDIT: I agree with jt's observation because of the reasons I find probable in the above.

What surprises me is when some Japanese people, even after hearing this, continue to be impressed at how well he speaks Japanese ("He sounds just like a Japanese person!"). To me, this sheds some light on the attitude that some (not all) Japanese have towards their language. It's as if the fact that he is ethnically Caucasian should somehow preclude him from being able to speak Japanese like a Japanese person...

Yet I get this sense that there would be some (again, not all) Japanese who would have a hard time accepting that a Westerner -- even one who was born and raised in Japan -- could be a native speaker of Japanese...

Of course, I don't believe that this is because the Japanese people who would feel that way are consciously prejudiced or racist -- it's simply that ethnically Western individuals raised in Japan are extremely, extremely rare while there are countless numbers of ethnically Asian individuals raised in English-speaking countries.

The extreme rarity of a Westerner speaking fluent Japanese in the past may very well be the cause of the misconception in the minds of the Japanese as you say here.