But getting to places in Japan is still stupidly difficult, even when you have local knowledge. Street naming is a better system because we walk along streets, not blocks. Unless you're Godzilla ..
That has not been my experience, and my direction sense is nil. The address system also has not harmed the Japanese distribution industry, which is quite possibly the most efficient in the world.
(These days all the routing is computerized, but prior to that all routing made use of the fact that Japanese addresses get progressively more specific. You used that to sort the parcel at every location so that it got to a distribution center closer to the destination, at which point one of your carriers who had worked in that neighborhood for years would get it directly to the proper door.)
I don’t know how many postmen share each zip code. In Copenhagen the western district has been sub-divided into a lot of zip codes so it could be that each is its own route, but they only did it for the western district, the other districts still only have a single zip code — I suspect that they did it to simplify sorting but found that people are more likely to make mistakes (when you have a dozen zip codes for the colloquially same district).
The Japanese system is better for finding a place on a map. If someone says, "3211 Birch St., Hickton" that could be anywhere in the city. If they say, "Hickton, West-区, Birch-町 3-2-11" you know to first look for the western part, then find the Birch area, then neighborhood 3, block 2, house 11.
Anyway, GPS makes the whole issue moot. Use your damn iPhone!
Even the the Japanese will readily admit that the Japanese system is a nightmare. Because elements are either named arbitrarily (the name of the town, or prefecture, or area, or whatever) or are named in the order they were established (district 9, or block 4, or house 2) finding them is essentially a hash lookup at every level.
"Sure", you say, "but streets are also arbitrarily named". Occasionally true. But there are many fewer of them than there are of blocks or buildings. Streets are long. If I say I need to get to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, a taxi driver in DC knows exactly where Pennsylvania Avenue is -- or only needs to look up that one name -- and can go right there. If I say I need to get to 3-14-13, Higashi-gotanda, Shinagawa-ku, Tokyo 141 Japan, then the taxi driver starts pulling out his street atlas. Okay I know where Shinagawa-ku is. Next, where's Gotanda, okay. Where's Higashi, district 13? Okay. Where's block 14? Building 3? Now, how do I get there? That's a lot of lookups, every one of which is randomized.
The opposite of this hideous mess is how things are laid out in, of all places,
Utah. Mormon settlements were laid out intelligently on a grid. The axes of the grid are the only streets with names --well, in the original plan anyway -- (In Salt Lake City it's State Street and South Temple Street). The remaining streets are named for the tick location on the grid on which they reside. Heading west from the origin, we have 100 West, 200 West, 300 West, etc. Heading south from the origin, we have 100 South, 200 South, 300 South, etc. Your address is also a number: if you're on 200 South, and your house is, say, a quarter of the way between 200 West and 300 West, then your address is 225 West 200 South. In a design like this you don't even need a map.
Back in the day, Kyoto was laid out like SLC in order to copy the Chinese capital. Nowadays, they still have Number-jo, but it’s not as all encompassing.
As I understand it, at least some Japanese cities were intentionally designed to be "stupidly difficult" to get around. The purpose was to make it more difficult to successfully invade them.
