Get a Japanese 3DS. I broke down and got one for both regions. I think I might be able to handle Dragon Quest in Japanese with my laptop open to jisho.org , but I prefer Fire Emblem, Crimson Shroud, and other text heavy games in English (plus I've played this in English on PS1 and have all the other DQ games in Japanese).
My Japanese reading is still fairly low level, as I only know about 300 kanji well. The fact that this game has furigana makes me want to play it more, as the older games are hard for me to read because they don't have much kanji and it can be hard to tell where some words break in hiragana, while the classic FF games are hard because they have so much kanji and tiny fonts.