Japanese addressing system
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Japanese addressing system
1–10 of 66 posts
Re: Japanese addressing system
#2Hello 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.
Re: Japanese addressing system
#3Obligatory "Falsehoods programmers believe about addresses"
* https://www.mjt.me.uk/posts/falsehoods-programmers-believe-a...
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5791489 (2013)
Re: Japanese addressing system
#4When 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.
Re: Japanese addressing system
#5When 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.
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.
Re: Japanese addressing system
#6I 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.
Re: Japanese addressing system
#7I 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…
As an engineer who did this for US addresses for about 6 years, my hat goes off to you. salute
Re: Japanese addressing system
#8I 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)
Re: Japanese addressing system
#9I 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.
Re: Japanese addressing system
#10Korea used a similar system but is transitioning to a newer system that is more like what is used in the West.