You’re basically focusing on the single hardest part of pronunciation (in regular usage). You’ll also note this is the hardest part for Japanese who are trying to learn English, as they essentially have to take what they consider to be one sound and divide it into two different sounds.

Unless you are currently living in Japan and speak Japanese near fluently, you really really don’t need to be worrying about this at all right now. As until you get to that point, you are going to have so many other things that will be wrong with your pronunciation that will make your accent stick out like a sore thumb, that you won’t even be aware of. In fact as an English speaker, if you are talking to Japanese, they will expect you to pronounce this wrong, to the point that in some ways it will make you more understandable if you do it wrongly than if you do it correctly, unless you are also good with everything else.

Losing your foreign accent is one of the last things that should be focused on when learning a language. As a teacher of ESL, I had this happen with so many of my students. They would focus so much on getting one small part of their accent more ‘English’ sounding, that really wasn’t that important, not realizing how horrible their accent was in other critical areas.

And yes you have to do it eventually, but it shouldn’t be focused on until more important things are taken care of, and you’ll find that once those other things are handled, you’ll likely pick it up without even needing to try, at least much.

TL;DR: Yes, it will be fine. ^_^

My native-speaking Japanese lecturer informed us that Australians speaking Japanese tend not to have accents. Or at least, comparatively slight accents. Go us.

Still not entirely sure if she was just trying to be nice, though. =P

Maybe she meant people from New South Wales. We all know Queenslanders are backwards. =P