Is there a convention to always place yourself last in a list of people?

Question

In English, a convention is to always say yourself last in a list of people:

(1) Mr. Tanaka and I drank tea. // <--- natural
(2) I and Mr. Tanaka drank tea. // <--- grammatically correct but extremely unnatural

what about Japanese?

(1) 田中さんと私がお茶を飲んだ。
(2) 私と田中さんがお茶を飲んだ。

How does #2 sound?

I was instructed to form English lists this way out of deference to others. Same idea as let guests sit-down first in a meeting, let guests begin eating first if you are the host, etc. Yourself is always last.

Does Japanese have this convention with regard to lists of people? For the same reason?

Answer 1

Order is not really important in most cases. Sentence 1 and Sentence 2 sound almost the same to my ears in the Japanese versions. BCCWJ Corpus has roughly the same number of examples of 私とあなた (43 hits) vs あなたと私 (35 hits). And "order in a list of people is important" is what I learned in English classes at school :D

I vaguely feel that order can be important even in Japanese in the most formal writings between companies, but could find nothing worth citing here. It was a lot easier for me to find articles about how important the order is in English. When I have to write something very formal in Japanese and want to play it safe, perhaps I will follow "the English rule" even in Japanese, but I don't know how important it really is.