I come from the "Orient" myself, albeit from a country that is at the opposite end -- alas, politically as well as geographically -- from Iran. Politically, the Iranians, with their Jacobin tendency and revolutionary history, are more like the French (my Great White Hope) than anyone else in Asia.
The syntactical body of the Persian language, moreover, is an Indo-European body, invisible to outsiders as it is, under its fine Arabic raiment. Its basic structure is SOV (with adjectives always coming after the noun they modify), so if you come to Persian from French or Spanish (SOV when a pronoun is used as the direct or indirect object, with adjectives usually coming after the noun they modify) for instance, rather than from English, you'll probably find it an easy language to learn. (You come from Japanese, and no foreign language is easy to learn.)
For English speakers, though, Persian may be in fact easier to learn than many other Indo-European languages, as Persian doesn't have grammatical gender of the sort that marks their nouns and adjectives among others. Persian is a very gender-neutral language. E.g., "she," "he," and "it" are all expressed by او (u). That certainly makes Persian love poetry very fascinating indeed. -- Yoshie