In a grammar textbook I have, there is this phrase:
幸{さいわ}い日本{にほん}で日本語{にほんご}を勉強{べんきょう}して、かなり話{はな}せるようになりました。日本{にほん}に行{い}っただけのことはありました。
The translation given is:
Fortunately, I studied Japanese in Japan and now I can speak it fairly well. I didn't go to Japan for nothing.
The thing that confuses me is in that last part, where the translation is "I didn't go to Japan for nothing".
It seems to me that だけのことがありました literally translates to something like "there was just that thing". だけ, to me, implies exclusion of other things.
So to me, the sentence should be something like "That's all I went to Japan for", or perhaps "That's all I got from being in Japan". The way I read it has more of a negative implication than the given translation.
What am I not understanding about this phrase in order to see how the given translation makes sense? Or perhaps is the given translation not as good as it could be?
Answer
Some of the other answers try to connect the meaning of the idiom だけのことはある to “just” or “only,” which is one of the meanings of だけ, but I do not think that it is the right way to analyze this idiom.
だけ means “extent.” It sometimes means some kind of limitation on the extent, but not always.
For example, if you go to buy a cloth and are asked how much you need, you can show the length of the cloth you need with your hands and say,
これだけください。 I would like this much.
(Depending on the context, this sentence can mean “I would like only this.” In the Tokyo dialect, これだけ is pronounced LHHH in the the first case and LHHL in the second case, where L and H mean low and high pitches.)
The literal translation of the sentence
日本に行っただけのことはありました。
would be “There was something to the extent that I went to Japan.” In your context, the “something” refers to the fact that the speaker improved his/her Japanese language skills, and the speaker is saying that it was worth visiting Japan.
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