Yup, 29 seconds is no all that much. And the control column displacement is not necessarily within primary field of view if the FO is trying to see something on that tiny CTTV screen on the left aft overhead panel (which means he is hanging out of his seat halfway across the center pedestal staring behind and to the left side) where he has to continuously check to make sure the area in front of the flight deck door is clear.
By the way, he didn't use full left rudder trim, it was just two left trim inputs each lasting a pretty short time, that was all it took. Check out the first
report which is sadly in japanese but clearly shows some of the FDR data as well as the flightpath and center pedestal of this configuration.
For someone with supposedly no manual flying skills he did a pretty fast recovery though, during night without anticipating any upset. Not bad on that at all, while of course the initial action wasn't great but not all that surprising in that 40 years old flight deck, designed without much knowledge about ergonomic man-machine interfaces.