Grabbed the WR by a matter of seconds. Pretty happy with this route for the JP version, though it relies on a lot of good RNG in the first 20 minutes or so - I did many restarts over the past week.

I can't conclusively say that JP is faster, because there are some timelosses, e.g. having to restart the playstation at some point to avoid softlock, slow camera rotations, voiced dialogues. But it at least shifts the RNG bottleneck to an earlier point in the run than for the NA version.

Note: Blue collar at 48:15. Everything else verified after timer stops.