I took a day off yesterday to attend the official Firefox 3.0 launch party in Tokyo, which celebrated the historic third release of the great open source web browser. At the party, I wandered around a large room filled with various industry people — developers, programmers, the occasional bigwig from Bandai or Yahoo Japan — with everyone in attendance being Japanese, except for myself and two friends from Italy and Spain who were with me. I knew intuitively that the normal mingling you’d expect at a party like that would be a little more difficult due to the (perceived) language barrier that separated us from the Japanese around us, and we would have stood there not talking to anyone all night if it hadn’t been for the natural exuberance that foreigners seem to have, enabling us to ignore whatever invisible social rules that may have been in effect and start up a discussion with strangers by, say, overhearing a conversation about Osaka and responding by doing an impression of the Glico Man, from the famous neon sign in that city. In no time, we had melted the ice and had a circle of interesting people around us, chatting about various topics. Back during my days as an ESL teacher, I quickly learned that my students responded more when I was energetic and outgoing, and in fact Japanese seem to take it for granted that foreigners will be a little more interesting in social situations than they are themselves. Incidentally, I really am happy to recommend Firefox as a great browser for everyone to use when viewing J-List or any other website, whether you’re on a Mac, a PC or a Linux machine, and I’m not just saying that because they gave me free beer and sushi, although that was pretty cool. I mean, what has your web browser of choice done for you lately?
