> Time spent flicking through flashcards for vocabulary ... seems like a poor substitute for time spent reading

I've been using Anki decks in tandem with native reading material to study Japanese. Whenever I encounter a word I don't know, I add it (along with a sample sentence demonstrating usage) to my Anki deck. Whenever I don't do this I get frustrated by having to look up the same words multiple times (often times a new word is used infrequently enough that I forget it even if I look it up every time I encounter it).

Also, when learning Japanese, there are a lot of things where memorization is very useful like learning to map between English words and kanji and learning the readings of place names and people's names.