I started being interested in japan because of anime, vns, and japanese music, so that naturally lead to an interest in the language. Personally I also just like the way japanese sounds, but don’t really like the sound of chinese. And because of those interests, it’s also more immediately useful.

Japanese also seems easier to me but that might just be a result of consuming japanese media for a long time.

And yes, there are chinese anime too, but they’re overall less well known even though there are some pretty good ones.