Welcome!
The forums are a bit slow these days because it’s been a while since an update and EtoEto is coming out soon.
I’ve been diving a few times here in Australia on the Great Barrier Reef, never even considered diving in Japan. I imagine there could be some cool historical dive sites there

I don’t know if you’re specifically looking for anime music (I don’t like anime so I don’t know, but I assume it would be easy to find anime music), but my two favourite Japanese bands are ‘Tokyo Shoegazer’ and ‘toe’. Tokyo Shoegazer is a shoegaze band (obviously) so it can be quite hard to understand the lyrics at time. Toe is a post-rock band so mostly instrumental, though they do have quite a few songs featuring singers

If you want to find some Japanese artists I can’t think of a better place to start than finding a Japanese record label. Look up or Google the names of some of these record labels and you should easily find a few Japanese bands. If you’re looking for J-Pop or shitty Japanese Glam-Punk bands check the plain record label pages. For something a bit more interesting and since you said you want to try more things, check out the independent labels page.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Japanese_record_labels
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Japanese_independent_record_labels

If that doesn’t work I find music by looking on these sites;
http://rateyourmusic.com/
http://www.last.fm/home

I write all the crucial points, vocab, particles and anything else I think I might need in a Moleskine journal. It’s nice and small so I can fit it in my back pocket on the way to uni, when I’m traveling or whenever I need to quickly reference it. It’s got a folder bit at the back as well to keep scrap bits of paper to jot down things which is nice.

I love my moleskine, it’s something I carry with me everyday. I pimped it with some safety tape so I can see it easily when I put it down on dark benches. http://postimg.org/image/pisofsjx1/

As for writing I use a pencil because I make a lot of mistakes (especially when writing down kanji).

That must have been so good, I wish I could have gone to the Wee Waa country show :(

I’m from Noosa on the Sunshine Coast, though I’m moving to Brisbane when I get back from Japan

I didn’t find hiragana particularly difficult but I would learn 10 a day. Personally, I didn’t find Anki to be the best thing to learn it with either, so I used http://unckel.de/kanateacher/index-en.html

After learning hiragana over what was probably 4 or 5 days, later on I was able to learn katakana in one day. So yeah it gets easier