A thought about the autisms:

People's reactions to me changed a lot during the ~2 years I spent in Japan - like, incidents in which I was treated badly because it was visible that I had brain issues became much less frequent.

I think I just figured out how to read people and do "normal" vocal intonation better during that period. To some extent that was a biological developmental thing - I was still having hormonal upheavals more common to thirteen-year-olds throughout college, and my hallucinations had only just died down for the final time when I moved to Okazaki - but part of it was probably the foreign language immersion.

It's kind of like I got to re-do part of the childhood language acquisition/socialization process, but with better control over my sensory bullshit. In a lot of situations my intonation and facial expressions come across more naturally when I'm speaking Japanese than English, but the connections I was making helped with English, too.