Japan Post launches 'digital address' system
japantimes.co.jp
japantimes.co.jp
As people have indicated in thread already, the current implementation is easy: a website frontend just needs to be able to resolve it to the physical address.
I think there is value though in carriers saying "no, wait, I'll do the lookup when I am ready to deliver!", because then I order something today with a 3-month lead time and if I move house, the delivery "follows me" to my new location.
Going further, I might want to specify my home address as the default, but for items under 2kg delivered 8am to 5pm on weekdays, please deliver to my place of business. If I'm in hospital for a prolonged stay, I may want to redirect to a friend or family member.
I actually expect some of the rapid delivery networks to get a bit more like this - I predicted with friends about 5 years ago at some point your Amazon delivery is going to be in a locker on the back of a self-driving vehicle. You (and everyone else in the street), will get a notification that its outside for the next 30 minutes - miss it, and it'll go get delivered to a nearby pickup site. Imagine if there was dynamic routing so that the parcel just "finds me" if I'm at work, or a bar after work... obviously I might want choices and options and so on, but I think the idea of parcels just going to where you sleep, whether you are there or not, is going to look quaint in 30 years time.
[edit: there's also a nice bit of privacy going on here the later the lookup happens - if nobody at the e-commerce site knows where I actually live, that information can't be leaked]
I could also black list entities from delivering spam.
Around here the Post already knows how to do this (I assume it's similar elsewhere), it's also used for government-related matters. But I guess other carriers do not.
I expect the overall results to be negative soon enough though : consider the issues USians have to endure with how (ab)used is their Social Security Number.
They're absolutely everywhere. Your tiny village might not have a grocery store, a school or an ATM, but it probably has a locker. Where my parents live (a village of ~2000 people), they have three. The vast majority of people have at least one in walking distance.
Before they became so popular, we used to do sign-on-delivery, leaving mail on your doorstep didn't become a thing here until covid. This made mail much harder to steal, but required you either to have somebody who would stay home all day, or to hunt down which neighbor got your package for you.
I saw on youtube that China has "open stores" where you go pick on shelf your parcel, all controlled via camera and face recognition.
In my country France the number of parcel lockers is going up but there's often sellers who don't propose them, or have some restrictions.
- you can receive things while you're not at home, don't have to carefully plan to be there for the courier (who then misses initial date and you need to do it again next day). It works 24/7 so you can pick up your stuff in the middle of the night if it's more convenient. You have 48hrs to pick up.
- you can send things, also 24/7, so no need to go to a blessed place between 9am and 5pm during week and queue. You can send your item Sunday evening, no problem
- the costs are also very reasonable. I sent a parcel from Poland to France for 7€ this month.
- you don't actually need to print anything nor even write the address. The courier opens the box, and they print a sticker with destination address.
- I believe it increases throughput because the courier doesn't have to stop at 100 places per day, they stop at lockers and unload N packages at once in every locker. Higher throughput -> shorter delivery times and lower costs
Parcel lockers are only really good for small and light items.
The moment you get into heavy or bulky or both then parcel lockers are a waste of time.
Who wants to go to a parcel locker and haul a 16kg package back home ?
Or if you have multiple deliveries, who wants to go to a parcel locker and haul 10 boxes home ?
I think this new Japanese "follow-me" system is genuinely a much better idea. Parcel lockers are yesteday's technology in comparison.
Heavy deliveries will always be a problem. It existing doesn't invalidate usefulness of things that solve light delivery.
I get anything valuable coming from a major delivery service (DHL, FedEx, UPS, US Postal Service) sent to my office. They're already stopping there (it's a hospital with plenty of doctors' offices in their attached tower, lots of stuff is delivered daily), someone can sign for it and lock it up. I have a key to get into my office whenever I need to, and if it's during the day I can borrow a cart or a dolly/hand truck to take it to my car. Can usually rustle up a spare cart even in the off hours. Done it for almost 20 years.
If it's a TV or something else large (appliances, furniture, etc.), it's going to be a custom delivery anyway, so I'll pick a time that I know I'll be home.
They're still wonderful for small deliveries, which are maybe 95% of everything I order. You can even redirect them or reschedule them easily, since a lot of it is based on web based systems that you can access with the code they send you and additional verification.
I actually had my computer case ship to a pickup point instead of a locker near me, so I could just go there when I had free time after work and haul it back to my apartment in the city (was like a 10-15 minute walk). It ended up being cheaper than getting it delivered to my door and was functionally identical to a package locker, just with a person verifying the code and giving me the larger item. It seems like some of those locations are in convenience stores, others in gas stations over here, a bit more relaxed than traditional delivery, for which I have to be present at a time I don't know exactly.
For the big items (such as a ladder, or a lawnmower or something for the countryside, or new fridge or stove for the apartment), there is still courier delivery, which brings it to your door, or can help you carry it upstairs if needed, though obviously more expensive and not worth it for anything but the bigger items.
I think all of those methods compliment each other nicely. No reason to scoff at one method if it helps others be more efficient: split up the load, less awkward logistics of the courier needing to talk with each individual recipient to make sure they'll be there in like 15 minutes after the call, but instead being able to take a lot of the less expensive small packages and just put them in the locker and letting the people sort the rest out themselves, handling a bunch of those packages in one go.
I even shipped my old GPU to some friends across the EU with DPD and the process was similarly simple - I just prepped the order online, put the info sheet on the package and put it in the package machine. They received the GPU a few days later. Fewer queues than a postal office.
I do that all the time. So does my wife. Especially if she has a baby stroller to use.
Or we just pull by the locker on our way somewhere, it takes just 2 minutes.
So do our neighbors who do the same. That's how I buy all my house chemicals, electronics, diapers. That's how I got a bulky coffee machine as well.
Multilockers are great too. Wife does a lot of tiny clothes transactions (both buy and sell), so it's great to have 4-5 things in one locker, picked up instantly. All is in an app, but can be a text message as well.
It's insane how big that revolution is. My elderly mom confirms. I can't possibly imagine that someone would actually say it's not convenient after seeing how it actually works. The only failure I see here is that it would be hard in a high crime rate areas. That is something technology can't really change easily.
I'm reminded of the Taipei refuse trucks that play Fur Elise to remind you that it's the five-minute window in which you can put your bins in the street.
I'm not very optimistic about delivery improving, because it's a three-sided market. You don't get to choose which courier the sender uses, but you're really their customer.
That sounds terrible from just about every perspective. What about people who work during that 30 minutes? Or who have mobility concerns? What about a parent who's young child just fell asleep? Should they all have to go to the pickup site? And let's not kid ourselves, it's not going to be nearby. Especially if you live in a rural area. And how do you open the locker when you get there? Do you need another app that tracks your every movement? No thank you, please just leave the package at my door.
With where I live now, yes. I've had a previous address with about a 15% package-theft rate within the first 2 hours of package delivery. In this situation I started to use lockers instead of straight to home.
I think this type of delivery system (mobile lockers to stationary lockers) would be a hit in areas with high levels of package theft.
I will prefer any of those options over my package having to sit in the rain or on the snow.
What I want is cheaper shipping if they drop it off at a post office or something. For example on Amazon I see it as an option but only ever as a "carbon-reduction" vs just delivering to my front door. I know it's cheaper - pass on those savings to me.
For delivery-to-post-office to be more carbon-efficient than them delivering to your house, the inequality (additional distance you need to travel to get to post office / your mpg) < (additional distance they need to travel to get to your house / their mpg) must be true. If you were gonna drive past the post office anyway, or your vehicle is significantly more efficient than their delivery van, then it might pencil out. If you're making an extra trip, it probably doesn't make sense.
You enter the code from sms, that's it.
The downside for carriers is that costs are unpredictable. Will they be shipping it a few miles or to the other side of the country?
The downside for the person ordering is that there is a race condition that makes it difficult for you to know where the thing will get delivered to. Perhaps you changed your location two days ago, and you are expecting a piece of furniture sometime soon. Did the furniture delivery process kick off before or after you changed your address?
Inpost - logistics startup in Poland managed to put lockers everywhere and you just receive sms when the parcel is there and you have 48h to pick it up
You can go whenever you want - simple and effective as hell
They disrupted delivery industry
Why not just let people mail to that code, and the post office then looks up the actual address? That'd also avoid any issues with leaking personal information.
With your approach, the burden is on the post office to update their handling process.
With the implemented approach, nothing changes about the postal process, and the burden of work is shifted to the sender, who must look up the code for the recipient’s current address.
Oops now my package is going to Joe Blow on the other side of the country.
That’s probably why.
Apparently he new system works a bit like DNS: the physical location may change, but the symbolic name stays. The resolution is done at the order time, not at the delivery time.
I suppose it's because the numerous e-commerce sites already support the physical address system. With the post office resolving the 7-character symbolic address to a physical address requires approximately zero changes in their existing systems, it's just an extra API call on the frontend. Support for direct use of the 7-character address would require serious changes.
Also, the 7-character address resolved to a physical address right before the customer's eyes works as an extra sanity check, and should limit the number of orders to a wrong address.
If they amend this to make it alphanumeric and then autopopulate this last three datums - it fits very neatly into the existing scheme.
No, it doesn't. You can just format that 7-character address like a valid address, essentially like:
番号０１２３４５６,日本
Fill any extra fields with placeholders or ０s as necessary.
The most you'll have to change is to maybe skip validation for those if you have address validation.
Here's whence real problems would begin.
Many places don't even do address validation for regular addresses, because it's generally dogshit and either too lenient to be useful, or too restrictive to not filter out lots of valid addresses. Even Amazon just checks that the postal code and city match, nothing more. You can put in an entirely made up street name and they'll happily try to ship it.
If you really want to have validation, you can add parity bits to the number, so you can validate it fully client side.
As a business you may learn an address is no good when you're trying to request and print the digital shipping label - that is if you're lucky and the provider does any validation at that point for your in-country shipment (for international shipping there's usually simply none besides checking that they can route it at least to whoever they hand it over to). Worst case you'll get a return.
For these IDs the provider should be able to tell you pretty quickly they can't route the package, unlike when the customer gets their house number in their regular address wrong, which is usually only caught once the deliveryman learns that nobody with that surname lives there. If you're lucky he'll remember you live on number 21, not 12.
In any case as an online retailer you'll already be dealing with lots of returns anyways - invalid addresses is just one of many reasons your shipments don't reach the customer. Anyone who does shipment has a processes to handle these anyways. Using numbers that can be quickly determined to be correct/incorrect should actually improve things.
So again: What are you on about?
One thing about the long physical address is that it adds a bit of redundancy. Misspelled or wrong name... still arrives. Misspelled street or city... might still arrive. I'm guessing 1 number off on that code and it's wrong. For the example in the story, a customer inputs the number, three store makes the call to Japan post and renders the physical address to the customer so they can verify before committing.
Shops with which I’ve worked will have several different carriers pick up packages during the week. Some pickups are for city-local packages, where others are cross-province packages. Finally, lots of packages are delivered from the shop directly by motorbike. The logistics are quite different for each, and they use different providers depending on situation.
Shipping everything to one location that redistributes would explode in both costs and complexity.
For those unfamiliar with it, numbers are incremented progressively around a block as doors are added to it. So the door "Block SanChome 4" could be on the opposite side of the building from "Block SanChome 6"
> Japan Post said Monday that it has launched a "digital address" system that links seven-digit combinations of numbers and letters to physical addresses.
Their proposal is useful when one wants to move addresses.
> Under the system, users can input these seven-digit codes on online shopping websites, and their addresses will automatically appear on the sites.
That’s already how it works if you buy something trough the online marketplaces here - Mercari et. al.
Mercari knows addresses of all counterparties, but the label that the seller puts on the package doesn’t have the destination address, and the label the package has when it reaches your door doesn’t have the seller’s address either.
So yeah, this system looks like a godsend, I want to try it as soon as possible.
* I don't know if there is a translation for this word.
The good old: ask a local about it. Nowadays people seems so against just stopping a random passerby to ask them a question. (obviously not feasible with the huge amount of deliveries we do today but back then it would have been reserved for the very rich or rare occasions)
What do you imagine going wrong? In my mind, if I had a digital address code, one of the first things I would do after moving would be to update it. Plus, the article alludes to functionality that displays (+ confirms) the physical address anyway…
the government can’t save you from being forgetful. :) But it CAN make the process easier. This looks great and as an american i’m jealous! A single place to update my address would be amazing.
Somebody sends a letter to that address. Regular mail system forwards it to machines. There, machines stick a yellow or some color strip on it with its actual destination, then it comes to you. You could move and simply update usps.com address.
Sure, maybe you can't use this for taxi rides, but that's a small price to pay.
I believe it would be translate to your actual real address if you order package at ordering process
Many online address forms in Japan uses equivalent of ZIP code to do similar already, but the expanded address are as granular as ZIP codes - I always fill in the rest of the address, but if I think about it, the fractions of users who do religiously verify and clarify the addresses must be less than 100%. I suppose this code will initially solve that problem with minimal infra changes for both users and the PO.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_addressing_system
It's exceedingly common, not just some edge-case you see every once in a while.
Hopefully it's the code, because the benefit of this is that if you move, you wouldn't need to update your address with a bajillion different companies, just the post office.
This is Ireland's postal code system. There's a small level of privacy built in, specific to an address (many taxi drivers ask for this) and 7 digits long. Web forms use it too, so quite common in normal life.
Surprisingly the postal service, An Post, don't use the postal code as their primary way to direct mail (as far as I understand) .
Addresses are one of those things that “what programmers frequently get wrong about X”.
I'm not sure how the delivery system works exactly, but I think they use the eircode? Especially in the countryside there often isn't much more than that. At my previous address the street doesn't even have a name; but post addressed to "my name, town, eircode" got delivered.
Also when the eircode was first introduced it really messed up the delivery, which seems to indicate they're using it?
Sorry I have it the wrong way round, there was earlier confusion which led to the below article and my incorrect understanding.
The system uses the eircode and the postman uses the address. (It makes sense a person would use the street address.)
https://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/an-post-c...
[0] https://www.eircode.ie/getting-an-eircode [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_codes_in_Japan
All that's different with Japans new system is that the code will be transferrable whereas Ireland's is not.
Japan has always been weird like that - people are generally quiet and respectful of others, but when it comes to trucks driving around blaring out political speeches, or a "pay to take your large trash" van playing music while driving around to advertise its presence, all bets are off.
We do get the aforementioned trucks driving around all day announcing loudly that they'll take your trash, for payment.. but it's very rare now. And the pole sellers seem to have disappeared entirely. I could use a new pole though.. for drying clothes. There has fortunately never been any political speech trucks around here. The town is too small I assume.
He wanted to tell everyone that tonight on TV there's an episode of a show with a scene filmed at the local beach. 6am!
Anyway, Japan has about 50 prefectures, I don't think any one of them being bigger than the Netherlands (maybe Hokkaido) so they could have a similar system by adding 2 digits at the beginning of the code.
> Risks and Countermeasures When Using the Service
> 1. Obtaining a Digital Address involves the following risks. Please use the service after understanding them.
> a. If a third party learns your Digital Address, they may be able to determine the corresponding address.
> b. Randomly entering a Digital Address may display the corresponding address.
> 2. Our company anticipates the above risks and has prepared the following mechanisms as countermeasures.
> a. Digital addresses can be deleted immediately, and the linkage between addresses and digital addresses can be disabled. Note that even if deleted once, a new digital address can be reacquired.
> b. The system has mechanisms to detect and prevent abnormal searches, such as a large number of searches in a short period of time.
> c. Even in the unlikely event of a personal information leak, our system is designed with leakage risks in mind to prevent personal identification. Digital address data is managed in a separate database from personal information such as email addresses and phone numbers, as shown below.
1. Japan Post lets you register your address to your Japan Post Account.
2. No static short code is created for your address.
3. Japan Post provides an API (like OAuth) for allowing you to persistently share your address location with a third party, say Rakuten, or Kuroneko Takkyubin, or something.
4. Once you've linked it to those services, they can use this API to get your address at any point in time.
5. You can unlink services whenever you want to revoke access, without changing any code.
6. No way to request an address for a Japan Post account without permission granted.
7. To handle cases like taxis, Japan Post can work with providers like GO Taxi, S.Ride, DiDi, etc. to do an authenticated one-time address share via NFC using the Japan Post App with the digital consoles already present in almost all taxis in major cities (no help for old taxis in the inaka, but that's a tradeoff).
a. or alternatively, persistently link your GO Taxi, S.Ride, etc. accounts to Japan Post for the same purpose.
b. and also potentially allowing to do such a key exchange with NFCs on smartphones or a standalone device, but probably taxi operators wouldn't be motivated enough to actually do that.
Yeah but you would still have better option than not being able to do that I think this is just move the security debt elsewhere which is bad/good it depends on theirs ends
In the status quo, it is clear you need to update addresses if you move; even if you don't, because you have to file a 転居届, Japan Post knows they need to redirect mail to your new address anyway; and you don't have the privacy worries.
I can see something like this 1 address for work, 1 for house, 1 for vacation house etc
Yesterday a courier brought a pallet with my new drill press costing over €500. Signature required, but when I asked he told me not to worry, there was no need…
If your drill press had been delivered to the wrong person, and the sender had chosen insured delivery (which automatically requires a signature), it would be easy to prove that the signature on file with the transporter did not match the actual signature of the recipient (i.e. you) (unless a fraudster forged your signature, that is).
Mind you, from what I understand, the seller is legally responsible up to the point of delivery in the Netherlands*. Therefore, even if your drill press hadn’t been sent with required signature, the shop would still be responsible in case it had been lost (but then the loss would come out of their own pocket, rather than that of the transporter).
Disclaimer: not a lawyer.
* Assuming you’re from the Netherlands due to your user name.
Indeed, if the pallet was delivered to the wrong address and someone just took it, the burden of proof would lie with the selling party. Of course, a reputable transporter will make sure the address is right (plus, people generally don't act as if they were indeed expecting a pallet delivered by lorry).
Yes, but this actually doesn’t matter.
The only time when the signature on file is actually relevant is when the sender lodges a claim for non-delivery. In that case, it could be compared to your actual signature.
Conversely, if no claim is lodged, the package must have been successfully delivered.
Disclaimer: not a lawyer.
That seems like the perfect system because if you assume Amazon isn't trying to steal from you, the system can prove if the parcel was properly delivered or not.
The merchant pays for thousands of deliveries, but you on the receiving end are at best getting a handful.
So the courier is incentivised to offer the best rates to the merchant while completely ignoring the requirements or preferences of the recipient.
Your only recourse is to complain to the shop, who might do something if the volume of complaints is high enough, but most likely they’ll just pass the buck to the courier…
Certainly for an expensive item, the customer may be out their time, but they are going to ask for a replacement or a refund or do a chargeback, the merchant is generally going to have to accede to the request, and the merchant ends up being out money.
So if the merchant decides to trade off security for delivery cost (by choosing a courier with a slack approach to verification), that's their prerogative and they are economically incentivized to make the right decision on that.
For delivery problems that don't result in a chargeback (the courier leaves it somewhere inconvenient, or claims you weren't in, etc, but it eventually gets to you) that's the situation where it becomes your problem and the merchant isn't much empowered or incentivized to fix it.
Here in Japan there's typically this little circle where you're supposed to stamp you hanko.. but I just sign my name, with a pen, whether the parcel is for me or for my wife. But at least the delivery guy will have me read the form to verify that it's actually for someone in the household.
Not that I would prefer the hanko.. that idiocy just have to go. I can see no safety in the system, it's just a made-up stamp after all. It has no place in a modern world. And it's on the way out, as far as I understand, but I still hear stories about people forgetting the hanko when they go to the bank, and despite having passports and other IDs they're denied service. And you need to bring that thing everywhere for contracts and the like.. and everything has to be done by physical presence.
we call those contactless smart cards
Smart cards contain a considerable embedded system for transactional processing; it's quite different from just transmitting an ID.
Makes it utterly useless as a digital signature then.
EMV, NFC, and RFID are all related technologies which may underlie “tap to pay / sign” features.
RFID: Radio Frequency Identification: passive powered by RF, returns data when powered.
NFC: Near Field Communications, is a protocol for communications, built on RFID, includes polling for readers and protocols for defined crypto and data storage/retrieval.
EMV: Eurocard/Mastercard/Visa standard for the data and crypto operations for an EMV chip, extended from physical by the use of NFC for contactless payments, primarily by replicating the data on the magstripe and adding some additional crypto and dynamic elements.
EMV is one standard for how to use an NFC card, there are others, primarily used for transit.
Alphanumeric codes are mathematically speaking a completely identical set to base 36 numerics
HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25023673
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_theorem_of_softwar...
So they've added an MMU (Mail Management Unit).
The actual feature doesn't seem mind-blowingly useful to me, in the era where most of my form fields get populated for me automatically anyway. Doesn't seem bad, just I don't see it being a life changing thing. I'd hope it does not work as a way for the Post to learn a little bit about my shopping habits. Probably not. Who knows.
But what I think is cool is a ten-year commitment to any computer-based system, which is sadly rare to see these days.
So memorizing a 7-digit code to enter address information without error seems like a useful feature to me (though admittedly not mind-blowingly so).
It could also be useful in other contexts such as sharing an address with someone verbally, over LINE, manually entering an address into a GPS, etc. Assuming the system actually catches on and the codes are universally supported in map apps.
Ref:
[0] https://www.thailandpost.co.th/un/article_detail/article/11/... [1] https://workpointtoday.com/digital-post-id/
I don’t see any particular upside at this point. It suffers from "weak enumeration" and possibly make stalking much easier.
(( sure govt will try to limit queries but there are many ways around it. Govt will spend millions over the next few years playing cat and mouse while ))
It can be even more granular than that. ZIP+4+2 is a thing.
If you don't know the storied history of an area in Japan it can be nearly impossible to find an address manually. You give someone your address in Japan, they have to either use the internet or ask people in the area to help you find it. Most are not based on streets, they are based on smaller and smaller named subdivisions of a given area.
Alas no, this is the exact opposite of Open Location Code and requires an internet connection to look up. We should be working on something that allows you to find an address on foot without an internet connection!
Japanese addresses are a problem this makes no attempt to fix. Just baffling to me.
It's an official ID card you're required to update by law every time you move, and they plan to link the address of both systems. Meaning every time you update you address on your ID it will automatically propagate everywhere.
In Japan the MyNumber system is live since a few years and a single card can already be used:
* As driving license
* As a unified heath insurance card
* As a unified way to retrieve prescribed medications, lab results, vaccinations..
* For doing the taxes and receive pension
* As a foreigner residence card (very soon)
* For digital signing of official papers (as a way to replace the Hanko stamp culture, it's working but not yet widely used)
The digital ministry is also expected to unveil an Apple Wallet integration in a few months to avoid having to carry the card.
A decent amount of stores do, though certainly not all.
[0]: https://www.statenspersonadressregister.se/master/start/engl...
[1]: https://www.statenspersonadressregister.se/master/start/vaar...
7 characters made up of letters and numbers let you find a specific building.
You can update your code to point to a new address when you move:
> Their digital addresses will not change even if their physical addresses change. Their new addresses will be linked to the codes if they submit notices of address changes.
Japanese postal addresses can be very unlike western addresses. The major unit chome then a sub, then sometimes an offset from a landmark or "street behind"
I've had late night taxi drives from stations have to check in at a Lawson to find the doorway.
Edinburgh has its own notation for which door on a stairwell which sometimes (if the gods will it) aligns to postal registry and council and utility billing. When it doesn't things get complicated. Glasgow, Dundee and Aberdeen all have their own variants of this stairwell door identifying notation as I understand it.
Dutch addresses putting the number after the street name can confuse people.
This one causes me problems _all the time_. My address is like:
12 XYZ Lane,
XYZ Road,
Town Name
Postcode
So often enough, when continental European companies insist on a structured address, they will then render it back out as some variation of:
XYZ Lane
12
XYZ Road
Town Name
Postcode
Basically have a third party DNS like company and all it would do would be digital addressing. Since we would also deliver the mail, there was the added benefit of not sharing your actual address, temporarily sharing it, having alternatives based on day, kind etc and potentially just sharing your phone number as your address etc etc
Looking back, this would've been a great company but one that almost no investor would fund
What 3 words is pants.
People live somewhere that doesn't have a name yet. They are going to name it anyways since they talk to others (I live near the new bridge). Eventually someone is hanging up a sign "new-bridge-street" and the name standardizes so bypassers will get to know the name also.
Isn't that how street names came into existence everywhere?
I thought we were talking about a situation, where there is no system already in place? Either there is no postal service, so this will be bootstrapped as well, if people care about mail, or there is already. In the latter case, they either have a system, in which case there would be in fact an address system, so it is irrelevant for the current consideration, or they don't. While I don't know how this state is supposed to exist, streets signs from randos would be an improvement so, why wouldn't they adopt it?
Also in case the local authority doesn't care anyway, you only need to convince your local delivery guy who lives next door and faces the same problem.
This doesn't sound good for privacy or security, though it's a nice convenience function.
> Under the system, users can input these seven-digit codes on online shopping websites, and their addresses will automatically appear on the sites.
1. The site shouldn’t get your address at all. They print the code on the package, mail it to Japan Post, and Japan Post takes care of delivering it to you.
2. You should be able to generate new codes arbitrarily.
i.e. A service like Apple’s Hide My Email, but for physical mail.
My guess is that's already planned, but they don't put all details in the first press release.
This will also require to alter the package label on the last mile because requiring the courier to scan every package or letter before they could even see an apartment number will slow things down to a crawl.
The next step would be to refuse to route mail other than to a digital address.
Next step, allow users to have short-lived, throwaway digital addresses which are nest to worthless to harvesters, who have mere weeks to act on them.
The post office should conceal the real addresses, not allowing outsiders access to the database. You shouldn't have to tell someone where you live in order to receive something by mail from them.
> Under the system, users can input these seven-digit codes on online shopping websites, and their addresses will automatically appear on the sites.
So the sites still use the physical address. In fact, the postal service itself doesn't even use the code.
The purpose is to simplify form input on websites, which was already solved by browser autocomplete.
I suppose the 'digital address' is solving the problem by effectively standardizing the input format.
Feel free to have any addressing system you like; it need not be number, street, city, state/province like many western countries. But it should at least make some logical sense.
The time when they were built is the reason
For every other possible use of addresses that system is much much much worse than the other systems in common use.
Why make life hard?
Also, naming roads does not change the problem much. You still have no idea where a place is if you are not on the correct road so you need a map in any case
If you find block 300 you also know roughly how far away block 9000 is and you know what direction to go. Or in the worst case when you see that the next block is all 2xx buildings you know you are going the opposite direction so you turn around.
This is the typical western street numbering design. There are variations - sometimes streets start at the center and indicate direction, so West Easy St vs East Easy St both start at 100 or 1000 and count up. But in general if you can find the street you want at any point along its length you can very quickly determine which direction to go and approximately how far.
To help orient you cross streets can be provided. If you know Avenue H intersects with Jones St then you cannot get fully lost. If you move up and down Ave H you will eventually find its intersection with Jones St and from the number you can determine which direction to go along Jones St (or someone can tell you Jones at 5000 block of Ave H).
Many cities go further and have a letter/number grid system to their roads that takes the same concept up a level: giving numbers, letters (or words starting with the relevant letter in alphabetical order). Minor roads might be named but move to the next intersection of any of them and you arrive at Ave H or 132nd St. And from there you know which direction to go and approximately how far to find 18th St or Ave A.
I'm not saying Japan should have adopted this specific system. But they certainly could have come up with a system that had some kind of scheme to it designed to help people figure out "if I am here which direction should I go to reach my destination?".
As a sister post said, the build order is that logical reason.
You buy something from somebody, they get a QR code and use that to get a delivery label. Delivery label doesn't have your address on it, only the delivery company knows where it's going.
Obviously it doesn't prevent something like "there's an airtag in the box" but it does prevent you having to tell the person selling you a used copy of Resident Evil 5 where you live.
Now we can have masked access-list, and block lists.
Seems like it’s applicable to some of physical world problems as well.
> Their digital addresses will not change even if their physical addresses change.
This is really weird. What happens when two roommates move to different addresses and a third stays behind?
The German Post already has "digital stamps", you buy them online and then you just have to write a couple of symbols on the envelope.
If you combined these together you would get a letter which can be fully paid for and addressed by writing a couple of symbols on it, only meaningful to the computer system. In a way this is making the physical world quite digital.
If I ever change my email provider I just have to change the catch all rule.
TBH I think that would be better than a centralised DB.
OK, so your social security number is your "digital address", and the post office has a database of everyone's current address.
I'm not sure what problem this solves. Shaves seconds off the time it takes you to write an address? Better hope they've got error correction built in, since normal addresses are fairly "fault tolerant" in terms of still being deliverable.
If you move you still need to notify them, although perhaps in Japan big brother already knows you've moved.
When we move, we need to register our address change at the city hall. In terms of Big Brother, that's a given.
The problem is that we also need to change all bank, bills, etc. too. So this replaces the need for mail forwarding, for example.
Presumably it'd be pretty nice if you lost touch with someone.
Entering Japanese addresses on Japanese websites can often be a PITA, with weird requirements for where to split the address sections, fullwidth vs halfwidth, spacing, and even what type of dash you use (ー vs －). I don't think I've ever had Safari's auto-fill be able to do it successfully.
Have you moved addresses before? It is a giant pain to track down all the services which send you letter mail and change your address with them. With an extra layer of indirection you only need to update your address in one place when you move. Think of it like DNS for physical addresses.
No, not really, Yu-ID is not the same as the My-ID (akin to social security number). So you wont have to reveal your social security to your taxi driver etc. if that was what you worried about.
>If you move you still need to notify them, although perhaps in Japan big brother already knows you've moved.
Yes you would have to change the physical address for your Yu-ID, but you don't need to tell all your acquaintances to update their greeting-card address list ( they can still send to the same Yu-ID)
Another case might be that you are temporarily living at a 'summer-residence' , or that work takes you to a new locations for months at the time.
Yea, but now this taxi driver will forever know where I live. Thanks, but no thanks.
"Where to?" asks the driver.
"Home!" says the man.
"Well, where do you live?"
"None of your business!"
More like minutes. Address input in Japan is a colossal pain in the ass. You have some sites that only allow half-width characters (e.g., ｷﾀ), some that only allow full width (キタ), some that require you to write your address twice and once in romaji, which can be half width (kita) or full width (ｋｉｔａ), some require you to write it in hiragana instead, sometimes numbers need to be full width(123 vs １２３), sometimes addresses have random unicode symbols like ・or Ⅲ (yes, Roman numerals are common in addresses) or ⑧ which may or may not be recognized, and more. There's no standardization in addresses at all and no street names, so every building gets some bizarre-ass name unique to it and the names sound like the title of a JRPG. You might even get stuff like 〜ＴＨＥﾋﾞｯｸﾞPALACEモナコ：Dréam Ⅱ〜
And the fun thing: every site has its own input standards, and no, they don't tell you what the error was. Most simply say "You can't submit. There's something wrong on this page." Some let you hit the send button, fail, and make you input everything all over again.
Having a code to input an address saves users loads of time and stress, assuming web developers implement it.
If you live in a high rise apartment, a plus code does not identify you precisely. Sadly to do this you need some knowledge of a structure's internals. It makes sense it's being done on the national level in Japan.
For example, a duplex where the front door of each unit is adjacent to the other. Even at the 4m resolution, that means both units front doors (and thus street addresses) can fall into one single pluscode.
Debatable considering it's based on lat/lon only.
> used for deliveries in many countries
Source? Their own website only lists 3 use cases, and only one is used for mail delivery, and even that is in Kolkata only.
Locating a person or business from that entrance is a separate concern. Which must not involve 3D or indoor maps.
>Locating a person or business from that entrance is a separate concern. Which must not involve 3D or indoor maps.
No, it isn't. If it were a separate concern what would be the point of encoding the address in the first place?
The missing street address used to be a big problem. The postal delivery people had (and still have, of course) a way to look up your address - which is really just the property number, in the area where I live) and find it on a map. Normal people couldn't. But now we can enter the property number into e.g. google maps, and it'll find the actual location. Which, of course, means that you need to be online with your digital device. Which I wouldn't be until recently (I've got this pocket wifi now), unless I was in a wifi area.
In my home country I can easily find any location just by someone telling me the street name and number. No map needed, no online presence.. my home address has a property id, known by the city, and a street address, for everybody else. Japan is like that, just that the street address is missing..
But this thing sounds like a Rube Goldberg machine. A much simpler solution is to have the subscriber log into their account and change their address
Nothing beats the What Three Words system and would be much more fun if not routeable at scale.
When I sign in to Informed Delivery, every month or so the USPS sends a postcard advertising their podcast (“Mailin’ It!”)
https://usps-mailin-it.simplecast.com/
This is a virtual postcard, so while I can read it in my email or on usps.com, I won’t necessarily find a paper copy delivered.
It is my understanding that commercial mailings can also use this mechanism. I receive some marketing as original JPEG quality, rather than being scanned in grayscale.
The usual 5 digit ZIP code routes to your Post Office. The longer ZIP+4 code routes more detailed locations: a city block, an apartment building. The even longer ZIP+6 code goes to something called delivery point, which to my understanding is basically a single mailbox. The ZIP+6 code is in fact embedded in the bar code sprayed onto the mail piece.