The Boy Kings

didn’t make sense to hire American speakers of Japanese and Italian to translate the site. We didn’t want a version of Japanese spoken by someone who hadn’t been in Japan for years and wasn’t current with the local idiom. Instead, two months after I started working on the team, Hassin decided that I would fly to Tokyo first, to work with Japanese translators, then fly directly from there to Rome, to work with the Italians. I was getting paid to go on a trip around the world, first class. “That’s a nice gig,” my dad said after I told him I’d be out of the country for a month. “Yes, it is,” I concurred, relieved and excited. My commitment to blanketing the world with our technology was going to save me from it. It is neat how life works this way: No system is complete; there is always a way out if you work hard enough at it. And sometimes, as it was in this case, the escape hatch can be fun.
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    Flying to Tokyo in late March 2008 felt like the fulfillment of every late-2000s American girl’s fantasy, since so many of us had seen Lost in Translation, and been entranced by its images offamiliar American actors ensconced in Japan’s cool, alien calm. I toyed with the idea of staying at the Park Hyatt, the hotel featured in the movie, but, in my perennial quest for authenticity, I picked the Okura hotel near the embassies, which had been renovated over the years to look exactly as it did when it was built in 1964. The Okura is a modernist Japanese wonderland full of exquisitely square, lacquered tea tables, enormous windows, and perfect stillness. When I arrived, I realized I was the only person in the hotel over five foot eight, and the only American. I felt like a huge cartoon character, with ungainly height and Technicolor blue eyes, struggling to appear restrained and petite amid the dainty Japanese women in dress suits and surgical masks having tea in the lobby.
    When Facebook executives traveled, they had an administrative assistant arrange their trip for them but, in the simple, under-the-radar style of our internationalization team, I had no secretary and made all my travel arrangements myself. Not knowing how to arrange a car service in a foreign country, I took the subway to the translation office every day, finding my way via the signs in English that corresponded to the ones full of beautiful but, to me illegible Japanese characters. The train was full of young Japanese workers in accessorized outfits playing on their phones. It seemed almost weird that Facebook would be coming to Japan to bring them technology; they already had so much. They can probably do things on their phones that I won’t for years, I thought. This was why winning Japan was so important to the guys in the office: not because they cared about the Japanese in particular, but because we needed to conquer the best. It was the Normandy of technology wars and, oddlyenough, I, the American girl who didn’t really care about beating Japan at anything, was the advance force, bringing them something they may not even need.
    As it turned out, simply launching Facebook in Japanese wasn’t enough to get many users beyond those with existing ties to America on board the site. Japan had a strong recent history of anonymous social networks, like the native network Mixi, and Facebook’s insistence on real names flew in the face of that. In early 2010, Facebook opened a Japanese engineering office to target the Japanese market specifically but, to date, the network remains relatively unadopted (at 9 percent penetration) compared to other countries worldwide. But, back in 2008, we had high hopes that we could succeed.
    At night, I went upstairs to eat in the restaurant on the roof of the hotel, fifty stories up, looking out over Tokyo. I didn’t know enough Japanese to leave the hotel for dinner, and feared that I’d get lost. Gazing across the glittering city, I felt disoriented by Tokyo’s size and its residents’ calm acceptance that the city appears to go up and outward forever. My meals would go on for hours, with chefs preparing course after course of shrimp and exotic fish and finely cut vegetables on the gleaming grill at the bar at which I sat. As I sipped on tiny cups of sake and grew increasingly full, I would think, “I’ve come a long way from the Riviera,” remembering the down-at-the-heels hotel in Las Vegas with a view of a parking garage that was my first Facebook-sponsored trip. When the bill