Much more efficient, but also much more boring.
Japanese addresses: No street names. Block numbers.
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Re: Japanese addresses: No street names. Block numbers.
#12Good to know! I leave for Tokyo in a few weeks. This is useful.
Re: Japanese addresses: No street names. Block numbers.
#13What is the advantage of this approach?
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.
Re: Japanese addresses: No street names. Block numbers.
#14I 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.
Re: Japanese addresses: No street names. Block numbers.
#15That 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 3…
禾森町 [noginomori-cho], south of Landy's?
Re: Japanese addresses: No street names. Block numbers.
#16What 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.
Re: Japanese addresses: No street names. Block numbers.
#17My 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 adjoini…
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.
Re: Japanese addresses: No street names. Block numbers.
#18What is the advantage of this approach?
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.
Re: Japanese addresses: No street names. Block numbers.
#19My 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 adjoini…
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.
Re: Japanese addresses: No street names. Block numbers.
#20In 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.