Japanese addresses: No street names. Block numbers. | Hacker News Reader

Japanese addresses: No street names. Block numbers.

sivers.org

57 pointssivers25 comments

My wife is Japanese and we own a house in Saitama which is a little ways outside of Tokyo. I go about 3-4 times a year.

I constantly get lost, even doing something as simple as walking the dog. It's not uncommon that I'll take photos of landmarks as I walk past as sort of a digital crumb trail to get back to where I started.

What makes it worse is that block numbers are based on age and may not be relative to adjoining blocks.

I once took her mom's dog for a walk and thought I was so lost that I made a frantic cell phone call three hours later, only to find out I was one block away.

You should get a GPS. Even without a map, it can do breadcrumbs of your path which allows you to retrace your route.

Second on GPS for traveling. I spent a few weeks in the Egyptian desert last year, much of that time in the hands of drivers who spoke little English. A few days of seeing desert all around you and no idea how much longer you're going to be itching to know where you are.

They get lost all the time, too. I think the #1 function of Japanese police is to give directions. There's usually a koban (small hut-like police station) outside the train station and they always have big maps out and they help people use them.

Suddenly Sudoku seems the most natural thing in the world.

That must make driving directions interesting. We can say "go south down Guadalupe St., turn left on 7th Ave." What's the equivalent where the streets have no names? "Go south down the street between blocks 5 and 8 in district 3, turn left when you reach block 4, district 2"?

Here's the directions to get to my house from the train station (I take cabs frequently):

"I live in XXXXX-cho [n.b.: name of neighborhood] #1. It is south of the $SUPERMARKET."

The cabbie then will ask me:

"Left at the Budda or right at the Budda?"

Its left.

[Edit to add: Half of the cabbies in my town of 150,000 can also do it from a building name. Any building name. Imagine if you worked on the same codebase for 30 years -- do you think there would be functions you couldn't find? Now, if you go to Nagoya, I would suggest not relying on that.]

"Here's the directions to get to my house from the train station"

Which constitutes a large part of the answer to how directions are given in Japan: it is almost always relative to the nearest train station. "Go out the South exit, turn right at the Colonel Sanders statue and go two blocks past the Pachinko parlor..."

禾森町 [noginomori-cho], south of Landy's?

Thank you for reminding me to update my whois record.

People use landmarks for direction instead of addresses (since nobody can understand exactly where an address is).

There are also small police stations (koban) everywhere in the city that are glad to help someone looking for direction: they take the map of the nearby district and look with you house correspond to the address.

Of course, now with gps becoming common for taxi drivers you can now tell them directly the address, before they wouldn't have been able to help you if all you had was the address without any landmarks or map on how to get there.

People do get used to it even though it is inconvenient. In India there's no rhyme or reason for home numbers. They are just the number available when you register your home.

I have a hard time writing the address on fedex mail slips, to mail something to my family. The address reads something like:

First Name, LastName Son Of Fathers name, 11-22 XYZ Colony, Apposite Kings college, Next to Gandhi Circle, Thane, Mumbai, India zip Code

Its no small wonder how it even makes it there.

What is the advantage of this approach?

It also avoids the confusion that is fairly common in big cities which have the same road with different suffixes. Atlanta is notorious for its numerous Peachtree Street, Parkway, Road, etc.

However the downside is that cities can half thousands of blocks, and also I would assume there are times when blocks are developed out of order, which would make directions quite difficult.

It's not like it was designed, much less with any advantage in mind - just a cultural artifact that developed differently than most of us are used to.

It is actually a lousy system: http://www.nytimes.com/1996/07/16/world/tokyo-where-streets-...

It is nice to be able to pop out of a subway station in Tokyo and know where you are and where you're going after a quick look at the map near the exit. That seems a bit easier under this system, and rail is quite widely used in Tokyo (nearly 4 million each day through Shinjuku station alone).

But that's not why it's done like this of course. They've been doing this for 150 years and similar to this for much longer than that, and they're not likely to change any time soon. Major roads, and some not-so-major roads, are given names by the way.

There are no major advantages. But once you get used to it (and esp. with the advent of GPS), there are no major disadvantages either.

I think that Brasilia has a similar system, but the blocks themselves are somewhat different from blocks in normal cities. Take a look here for instance

http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&ll=-15.807925,-47.894082...

Those weird names like SQS304 are in fact block numbers.

In Salvador, Bahia (Brazil/Brasil) street names and numbers are used but the order of the numbers seem to be random sets. The hardest part is that the men I would talk to to find an address almost never say "I don't know". Instead, they act like they know and 50% of the time send you in the wrong direction.

The interesting part about having spent years in Africa, Europe, Asia and America is that even when I learn something like this, it is mildly interesting, but does not seem to have any effect on me.

I feel like I am jaded - too used to being confronted by the new.

It's almost like travelling too much has taken away the suprise of travel for me.

As with their language, this is a marvel of inefficiency (good luck giving directions) and makes me wonder how they accomplish so much while starting at what seems from the outside to be such a tremendous disadvantage.

Do you mean the written language?

I actually think it has advantages and disadvantages. An address has a neighborhood, a block number, and a house/building number. The neighborhood name puts you in the correct vicinity. There are signs showing the block numbers, though I never got the knack of finding them.

The advantage over street names is that the first part of the address, the neighborhood name, gives you a rough idea where the address is located. Knowing a street name in the US may tell you very little. Streets can and often do extend all the way across town. Older streets can zig-zag or have disconnected segments.

The disadvantage is that in the US, if you know a street name and a cross street, you can often find one of the streets by wandering around randomly. Then you can go up and down that street looking for the address or the other street. Wandering randomly in Japan is fun, but not a good way to find an address.

Another disadvantage I've encountered is that you have to be very careful of neighborhood boundaries when consulting a map. Looking for block 12, you follow the numbers across the map 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 but you don't realize that the block 12 you found is in the adjacent neighborhood, and the correct block 12 is all the way on the other side.

Good to know! I leave for Tokyo in a few weeks. This is useful.

Much more efficient, but also much more boring.

Doesn't seem that efficient, actually. If blocks were numbered in some straightforward sequence and house numbers were, say, given as clockwise from the north-west corner instead of age of construction, that'd be reasonably efficient.

Look at the map in the linked article - if you go down from block 29, you hit 39. Go further, you hit 40 - or the un-numbered block between 29 and 41.

Given arbitrary block numbers and arbitrary street names, finding a street and moving along it to the desired address seems to be an easier task than locating a block and then trying all the buildings in it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com