

Japanese addresses: No street names. Block numbers. - sivers
http://sivers.org/jadr

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jawngee
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.

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kqr2
You should get a GPS. Even without a map, it can do _breadcrumbs_ of your path
which allows you to retrace your route.

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lallysingh
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.

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thunk
Suddenly Sudoku seems the most natural thing in the world.

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randrews
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"?

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patio11
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.]

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

~~~
patio11
Thank you for reminding me to update my whois record.

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prpon
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.

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amichail
What is the advantage of this approach?

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trickjarrett
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.

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aaa
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...](http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&ll=-15.807925,-47.894082&spn=0.012223,0.022745&t=h&z=16)

Those weird names like SQS304 are in fact block numbers.

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joel_feather
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.

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utefan001
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.

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mattmaroon
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.

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dkarl
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.

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

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oomkiller
Much more efficient, but also much more boring.

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Semiapies
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.

