"all" might be a bit of an exaggeration, but the philosophy is to learn to recognize roughly 2000 kanji before starting the actual language learning. Volume 2 and 3 are supposed to complement more normal language learning.

The theory is based on the authors experience seeing Chinese and Korean students learn much, much faster than their western peers in Japanese language classes, coupled with an argument for "If you can read 50% of characters, you still can't read"

I'm surprised you've never come across this, as it is in the foreword.

> There will be somebody, somewhere who took this path and is happy to tell you about their success using it.

I met this somebody in Japan. If I remember correctly, he spend a summer "doing" RTK, then took 1 semester Japanese at his home university, went on exchange to Japan for two semesters, and after finishing his first semester abroad he passed JLPT 2 (not N2 - this was before they added the N)

Good for him. He was a strong student, but I wouldn't recommend it.