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I am self teaching japanese. I have a few persons At my college that are natives and they guide me on the right paths. For example they say Hiragana is simpler to understand for a base instead of katakana and romanji is only needed to explain how to pronounce.

My question is:

Do I need to be in an environment that it is spoken with in order to better my self with it?

Can I do just aas good on my own with out the hassle of corresponding.

My answer would be yes, and no.

Certainly you don't NEED to go to Japan to learn anything, but you'll have to continually study harder to memorize it all. As for being 'as good' the depends on how hard you study, and how long the other person has been in Japan. Going will certainly boost application of skills and accelerate the learning process however the information is technically the same. It's true that it's easier to "refine" your speech abroad, but if a native speaker can understand your accent you'll be fine (I still get chuckles about my heavily Texan accented Japanese heh.)

If you did decide to go however, the best results seem to come when you've got a firm grasp on the basics, say if you went during your second or third year of studying as oppose to right off.

I saw a lot of first year students who completely withdrew into small cliques and basically didn't learn anything more than they would have in the states because they didn't have the confidence to venture outside their English speaking groups and explore the terrain sort of speak.

When you're not quite at a conversational level but can form sentences and are well trained in 'charades' seems to be the optimal point for language immersion.

TL;DR: Is it needed, no. Is it worth the effort and cash yes.