Japanese homogeneity
Today I woke up 6am in the morning, took the BART to SFO and then caught the shuttle going down to the valley to Mountain View Hilton Garden Inn, to attend as a panelist for JTPA Sillicon Valley tour.
I talked as a panelist for the panel session “working in IT industries” but it was, like other panel session, just an usual chatter about the industry. It was fun anyway.
There were around 20 mostly university undergraduates coming from Japan to here, to see and feel how people here enjoying their life in Universities (like Stanford) and software engineering companies (like Google, Oracle and Apple). Apparently JTPA is a NPO to help Japanese tech professionals to work in the valley.
Anyway I attended to the other sesisons about “startups” there and moved to San Jose for the networking party, where 80 or 90 Japanese people working in San Jose and the valley area gathered together. I found some people that I know very well, like digitalbear and naan, and it was a nice meetup. But at the same time I got really tired of speaking Japanese for the whole day and with 80 Japanese people in the same place.
You know Japanese people are almost homogeneous. They look very similar and mot people try to behave mostly the same. It’s just 3 months for me but getting back in that homogeneity made me feel a little uncomfortable, in the sense that I don’t feel it very natural. I guess that’s how living in the U.S. changed the way I think.
We went to naan’s house after the party and his room was so spacy and the interior decoration was so superb. I got a little inspired by that …