Looking back: Who said Japanese not good at English?

Now I am reading a book titled "英語達人列伝" that means "legendary English masters". The book features people in the era that English first came to Japan, when there is no enough book, accurate translation, no real pronunciation, no Internet. Compared to now, it is poor environment for learning English. But those legendary masters did master English in such a bad situation. And not only be fluent, they were more than ordinal native English speaker, they read and wrote very sophisticated books, and spoke not only tell what you have, they could even tell jokes.
The common element they had was "effort". They learned English very hard, that is it. No trick. People tends to be thinking that there is a easy way to master English, but actually as I feel, there is no way but to put as much effort as you can. Nitobe Inazo for example, read all the books in the library in a short period, he even got ill studying too hard. And they don't think those effort as effort. They got really into the learning and was seeing the different world.
With internet and books, people prevalent, the situation is much more better, but Japanese are said to be poor at English. But it is not, the book tells us. If you say you can not speak English and it is Japanese education's fault, rethink about it. What have you done? Language is not something easy to get.