Yes that is true. Korean has many more similar sounding vowels and consonants and more special pronunciation changes whereas if you can pronounce all the hiragana by themselves you can basically pronounce any Japanese word.
I thought it required '='[^1-9] ?
Because real 'password' = 'bogus crap' would turn into 0 which would then be compared to a string starting with something else than 1-9 which gets turned into a 0 as well.