Japanese addresses: No street names. Block numbers

I live in Japan. This is stupid.

I don't mean the blog post; I mean Japanese addresses are stupid.

From any perspective other than maybe obfuscation, and confusing invaders 400 years ago, they are idiotic. Every country in the EU and North America has a better address system.

There are more reasons than this why this is dumb, but let me list a few I've encountered personally:

1.) Blocks can be fucking BIG. You can take a taxi to Mouyameroyo 1-3 (the block number) and still have no idea where you are, have to just choose to walk around it to the left or to the right, and if you choose wrong, and its a big block, you will walk a kilometer or more. (In my case, the place I was looking for was a children's hospital for a child with a high fever. I mean of course right? When else would it happen.)

2.) There is no way to refer to a block that doesn't exist yet. You can't infer any hypothetical address range based on what comes before or after it. Blocks don't get numbered in any sane order. You can try, as the builders of my apartment did, to guess. But you might be wrong, as they were, and then all the documents have to change.

I love Japan. My kids are dual-citizens and I chose to mostly raise them here. But some things about it are just super-dumb, and this is one.

(Don't even get me started on the date system, used to this day on many important documents including virtually all financial documents, which is based on when the current emperor dies. It's the year Heisei 29 right now. There is no way to accurately refer to dates in the future, because we don't know when the current emperor will die. (Or, as he hopes and deserves to, abdicate. I assume that will affect this kind of date system also.)

The idea that the default address should be an ordered number on a street is recent — still within living memory (e.g. my grandmother in Australia refused to go along with it when it was introduced and “required” there and continued to provide the name of her house, despite what the post office said – – and her letters still arrived).

It’s actually rather sad to me that the roads have become the default and the space between the road is the “other“. Roads and paths used cut through the former default which was land. In fact the roads had the names because they were the rarest thing. But of course, starting with cities, our mental maps must have started to flip.

If you spend a lot of time backpacking or hiking you start to get back the idea that the path cuts through the land rather than the land being what lies between he roads.

This is another area where I believe self driving cars will be a win: the very idea of roads may become less significant.

Blocks did have names in some American cities. I have to say that I know this only from novels, which would probably put the practice back about the late 1940s.