
Japanese addressing system - jakestein
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_addressing_system
======
freddie_mercury
I think lots of places don't have the numbering system that Americans take for
granted.

In Vietnam my address is something like 422/35/11 Dien Bien Phu, Ward 17, Binh
Thanh district, Ho Chi Minh City.

The number means "go to the building #422 on the main road and turn down the
unnamed road you see there; drive until you see the house numbered 35 and turn
down the unnamed road THERE; then proceed to number 11."

Make sure you're looking for #422 in Ward 17 and not some other stretch of the
same road that might reuse those numbers.

Oh, and if you're still using the old address system then I'm actually at
107/11b. ("B" because a single lot was subdivided once upon a time.)

Notice there are no zip codes.

99% of web forms outside of Vietnam can't handle my actual address. They
require a zip code or disallow the "/" character or don't have room anywhere
to write the Ward and District. Last time I checked, Open Street Maps didn't
know how to parse my address and find my house.

And this is for a country with 100 million people -- more than France, the
Netherlands, and Belgium combined. I'm sure other developing countries, also
with tens of millions of people, have their own idiosyncrasies that get
papered over by Western developers.

~~~
peteretep
> don't have the numbering system that Americans take for granted

I’ll take a second to point out that American addresses are bizarre to many
Europeans, for the same reason that your dates are; the room number or suite
number is written _after_ the street number.

Random addendum: in the UK, a postcode plus a small number will accurately
identify most addresses, and when entering an address online you’ll be asked
for a postcode and then prompted to choose from about 20 residences or
businesses that that could be

~~~
ginko
I wouldn't call them 'bizarre', just different. You already mentioned the
ordering thing. What's also quite different is that in Europe street numbers
are usually consecutive while in the US you usually use the top digits for the
block number and the bottom digit for the number in the block. That's why you
barely see street numbers over 2 digits in Europe while they're usually 4
digits even for small streets in the US.

I guess the American system has its advantages when you split up properties.
In Europe you sometimes end up with numbers like 12A, 12B etc. that way.

~~~
skissane
> What's also quite different is that in Europe street numbers are usually
> consecutive while in the US you usually use the top digits for the block
> number and the bottom digit for the number in the block

Years ago I rented a newly constructed house in an outer suburb of Sydney,
Australia. The suburb had (at the time) only been recently developed. The real
estate agent told me the address I was renting was "Lot 8 Whatever Rd". I move
in and get all the utilities transferred into my name. A couple of months
later, I get a notice under my door warning that my electricity is going to be
disconnected because I hadn't paid my bill. I found that odd since I had paid
it. The next day, come home to find the power is off. Call the real estate
agent, who sends out an electrician who discovers someone (presumably the
electricity company) has removed the service fuse. He puts it back in. I call
up the electricity company to complain.

Soon I discover the answer: "Whatever Rd" actually had three separate houses
on it all called "Lot 8". I'd actually been paying the electricity bill of the
"Lot 8" up the road. I give the electricity company the meter number from my
electricity meter and they sent me a bill adjustment, no more problems with
them. But, I keep on having problems with mail going missing, and getting
other people's mail, because with three "Lot 8"s on one street, the post
office doesn't know which one should get the mail, they seem to distribute it
randomly between them.

I complain to the real estate agent about the street address situation. He
says to me: "Nothing the landlord can do about it, street addressing is
responsibility of the local council." I sent the local council an email to
complain. Their response – "We can't assign new house numbers to that street
yet, because development plans have not yet been approved for all the former
rural blocks, so we don't know how many street numbers will be needed." I say
– "Can't you just work out the maximum number of houses each of those blocks
could possibly have, given planning regulations, and reserve that many for
them, maybe even a few more for a margin of error?". Their response – "No, we
can't do that. Then there might be gaps in the street numbers. Gaps in street
numbers are not allowed."

They did tell me I could disambiguate my address by adding the development
plan (DP) number to it (the DP is the legal plan approved by the government
for subdivision of the original rural block of land). So my house was "Lot 8
DP 12345678" and the other "Lot 8"'s were "Lot 8 DP 4567890" etc. I asked how
the post office would know what DP number my "Lot 8" was. The council said I
should stick a sign out the front, next to the mailbox, with the DP number on
it.

I didn't stay in that house for long, as soon as the fixed term of the lease
was up, moved out.

But it did convince me that the American approach is actually superior.

------
stuartcw
I used to manage address data in a insurance company in Tokyo. We had about
20% of all Japanese addresses in the database.

It was a challenging job.

Parsing the new addresses, normalising them and matching them to existing
addresses was a major effort.

The Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism publishes
electronic data about historical addresses as huge address changes have been
done over time with the creation of new cities and metropolitan areas. That
all has to be factored in when trying to normalise a pre change address.

Rural addresses get weird. Sometimes we had to try and find anomalies on a map
to check that they were possible addresses.

In the end, the biggest help to find mistakes in the data is to send a
postcard to that address. If it gets returned then investigate the reason.

~~~
jspash
There is something deeply satisfying to me when a non-technical solution
(sending a postcard) is used to solve what could be seen as a purely technical
problem.

But I suppose it depends on which department is in charge of the project. In
the places I've worked, if the project is deemed to be IT-related in any way,
a "meatspace" solution like this would never see the light of day.

~~~
xanipher
How is this a purely technical problem? I'd argue it's a purely non-technical
problem, especially in the many cases where e.g. the postal worker needs some
implicit knowledge to make the right decisions.

------
Sir_Cmpwn
Hello from Osaka :)

I love the way Japanese cities are laid out, and accept this system as a
consequence of that. The haphazard layout is very aesthetically pleasing and
walking from A to B, while requiring a winding and inefficient route, is a
very pleasant experience. I live in Philadelphia, where the grid is convenient
but feels suffocating and artificial. The more organic layout is much warmer.

~~~
eloisant
Or, you can go to Europe that have an organic layout like in Japan but street
names and numbers like in US.

So you can have a pleasant experience following an inefficient route but still
reach your destination.

~~~
trickstra
That organic tree-like structure is often more efficient than always taking
only 90 degree turns

------
userbinator
_When written in Japanese characters, addresses start with the largest
geographical entity and proceed to the most specific one. When written in
Latin characters, addresses follow the convention used by most Western
addresses and start with the smallest geographic entity (typically a house
number) and proceed to the largest._

Big and little-endian, in other words.

~~~
needle0
I don't quite get why the latter became widespread in the west, though - we
read text from top to bottom, we pinpoint addresses by drilling going from the
largest geographical entries down to the smallest, why make them go reverse
against each other?

~~~
saghm
One benefit I can think of is that the volume of addresses that the average
person reads tends to decrease with distance from the person's home. This
means that in a left-to-right, top-to-bottom language, you can start reading
from the beginning of the address, and as it gets more general, eventually you
hit a point where it becomes identical to your address for the rest of it, so
you can stop reading. For example, when reading an address in the city I live
in, I can read the number and the street, and then once I see the city name, I
can stop, since I know everything I need to. This would be a bit more
difficult if you had to start from the bottom right and work your way
backwards, so I'm guessing that the ordering was chosen to maximize efficiency
for those common, local cases.

~~~
actsof
Exactly, it's the same reason most date formats don't start with the year,
even though it is the most significant of the numbers. If I write 12-8-2019,
the 12 is the most important number for me, in speech I will usually refer to
the date as "the 12th". In the same way, if I'm telling my address to someone,
I'll just say the street address, since we can assume I live in the country
we're in right now (which of course doesn't work on the internet, hence we
specify additional information at the end).

------
enlyth
I moved to the UK more than five years ago and cannot get enough of this
algorithmic postcode system here. It narrows down almost to the house on some
occasions, while postcodes in my home country are basically "within 100
miles".

~~~
bmsleight_
Also if a address get more than 20 items of mail per day. The Post Office will
give you your own post code.

------
asutekku
I don’t know, before i moved here the system was kind of confusing but having
lived here for a year, i think it is pretty neat system! I really have had no
need for street names after i learned to understand it.

(And you know, writing the address to google maps gives you pretty precise
location)

------
mempko
When I was living in Japan, the most confusing thing was that most roads,
except large ones, didn't have names. People would either draw me a map to
show me how to get somewhere or literally take me there.

~~~
mikekchar
And half the time, if there is a street name marker, it isn't actually the
street name. It's the chome that the street is butting up against.

~~~
Hinrik
Chome?

~~~
OJFord
[https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Chome&redirect=no](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Chome&redirect=no)

------
gumby
The stories in this discussion make it easier for me to understand my
grandmother’s refusal to adopt a house number when South Australia assigned
them (50s? 60s?). Up into the 90s when she moved into a unit she insisted on
using just name of her house, and it appeared to work just fine.

And it’s not like she lived in some grand house; just an ordinary single
family house. I walked by it last year and the current owners have a number on
the gate (up I had never known what it was); my cousin kept the house name
plate that unused to hang there.

------
ghaff
I've travelled to Japan a number of times over the past 10+ years. So, pre-
smartphone to full mobile/data/maps/e-guidebook with Google Maps links/etc.
Also Google Translate (although in practice I find that less useful).

What a difference it's made to getting around! I recall going back a number of
years finding many specific things could be a real challenge. I remember
wandering around for an hour once trying to find our office.

~~~
magicbuzz
Without smartphone was tough in Japan. But streetview was great. I’d put an
address in, then look at each corner to ensure I knew what each turn looked
like after arriving at the local station to get to the specific address.

------
orthoxerox
We have _two_ countrywide address encoding systems that encode the address as
a strict hierarchy, but both fail to encode the legal address of one of our
customers, which is something like "1500m down the dirt road starting at the
27th km of the TownFoo-TownBar road". No house number, no street name, no town
name.

~~~
Moru
What about P.O. BOX 52, Nearest_town_name.

------
bane
Korea used a similar system but is transitioning to a newer system that is
more like what is used in the West.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Addresses_in_South_Korea](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Addresses_in_South_Korea)

------
throw0101a
Obligatory "Falsehoods programmers believe about addresses"

* [https://www.mjt.me.uk/posts/falsehoods-programmers-believe-a...](https://www.mjt.me.uk/posts/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-addresses/)

* [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5791489](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5791489) (2013)

* [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8907301](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8907301) (2015)

* [https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=mjt.me.uk](https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=mjt.me.uk)

~~~
jen729w
My UK-centric view of addresses caused me an unnecessary and unpleasant 3kms
walk, backpack-laden, in high summer Sydney heat back in 2003.

Turns out “100 Some Road” can exist in multiple contiguous suburbs here in
Australia. The numbering for the road re-starts at a suburb boundary! Who
knew?

This means that, upon exiting a train station and seeing number 2, 4, 6... to
your left, you can’t walk left and find the 100 you’re looking for. You might
be in the wrong suburb, and your number 100 might in fact be to your right.

I remember that day like it was yesterday. 2nd December 2003. I’m an
Australian now, but I had the good sense to move to Melbourne. ;-)

~~~
blahedo
Many parts of the US are the same. Even worse: there are areas in the Chicago
suburbs (I presume other cities' suburbs too) where since a town boundary runs
down the middle of the street, the numbering on opposite sides of the street
are actually going in different directions, because they are relative to two
different town numbering systems. O.o

~~~
ghaff
This and problems like this are rampant in New England which is mostly covered
by a lot of smaller towns (with a few large cities of course). Basically
everything usually resets at a town boundary. Sometimes the name changes.
Sometimes it doesn't. But numbers almost always reset.

And, even within a town, it's not unusual for streets to change name a couple
times in the course of a few miles. And towns reuse street names all the time
--especially for things like Main Street.

~~~
hibbelig
> _And, even within a town, it 's not unusual for streets to change name a
> couple times in the course of a few miles._

You say that as if it was a bad thing. This idea that a "street" is a line on
the map, and whether there is actually asphalt at that spot is yet to be
defined -- this is a very strange idea to me. If I get to the right street, I
expect to be able to follow it until I get to the correct address. Streets
with gaps in them don't work so well for this.

Yes, if the city is laid out in a rectangular grid, that has its advantags,
too. But I just want to point out a different way to look at things.

(European perspective.)

~~~
ghaff
>If I get to the right street, I expect to be able to follow it until I get to
the correct address.

Assuming you're on the street in the correct town, sure.

Continuity is actually one of the things that was fixed as part of the whole
E911 system in the US. Before that, you _would_ sometimes have streets that,
for example, would have two segments that weren't actually connected in the
middle. Or you'd have a single named road with a T shape or some other layout
that meant you couldn't just follow it from one end to the other.

You also, as someone else mentioned, used to have houses with rural route
numbers (I grew up on one) that didn't have a street address at all. In our
case, our town address didn't even correspond to where we were located because
it was the adjacent town that did the RR deliveries.

~~~
gumby
This is still pretty common in the US. Midtown Palo Alto is full of streets
with discontinuities and small side streets all bearing he same name.

------
jillesvangurp
One of my friends wrote an article about geocoding a few years ago:
[https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jan/13/google-
ma...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jan/13/google-maps-
geocoder)

In short, addressing and geocoding is a hard problem and there are lots of
weird edge cases. The web is full of broken assumptions about addresses, post
codes, etc.

------
kbouck
On a trip to Tokyo we had challenges locating a restaurant based on the
address. Despite handing the address to the taxi driver, we got to the block,
but the driver couldn't locate the restaurant. He had to call the restaurant
to have someone come outside and wave us in.

Left us wondering how that addressing system works.

From the article i'm guessing this would have been a "banchi" block, where
numbers were assigned in order of registration.

~~~
hawkjo
Yeah, you got it. Building numbers—banchi blocks—label the age of the
building, not its position in space. The only people for whom many addresses
are physically findable seems to be people from the neighborhood who have
memorized the arbitrary number of each building. Google maps is a blessed
thing generally, but an absolute godsend when visiting Japan.

------
colechristensen
Only thirty years ago (I'm having trouble finding the exact date of
switchover) rural addresses in Iowa were of the form

Box #123 RR 456 (RR for Rural Route)

City, IA 50000 (city of nearest post office)

The replacement started in the 1990s was called something like 911 address
because nobody but the postman could easily navigate to your home unless they
already knew. Country roads didn't have names.

~~~
techsupporter
That's what they were called in Texas, too, "911 address." Before that, people
who got mail delivery to their houses usually used some form of [lot number]
[locally-known street or platted subdivision]. If you owned multiple lots, you
used multiple numbers. My grandparents' address was something like "10-11-12
Rocking Ranch, Middleofnowhere TX 75333." After 911 addressing, it became the
usual format but the street names were assigned by the county if you weren't
in a city.

Then there were the people who didn't get mail delivery so all they had was a
PO box. To this day, there are people who still only have a PO box as their
"real address" and they have to go get a 911 address assigned from the
Postmaster or their county when they renew their voter registration or state
ID because the state decided a few years ago that PO boxes weren't real
addresses for voting or having on a license. The address still doesn't work
for mail delivery, it's just to fulfill a location rule.

------
malloryerik
I wonder if it wouldn't make sense to use GPS coordinates.

~~~
GeneralTspoon
Too precise I think - you can have multiple GPS coordinates for one address
e.g. 2.00000000001 and 2.00000000002 could both be on the same building. Even
a bounding box is too error prone.

Also, verticality would be an issue.

------
peteretep
If I had the time and knowledge, I’d add a whole bunch more examples and
graphics to this page

