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Japanese addresses: No street names. Block numbers.

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Re: Japanese addresses: No street names. Block numbers.

#21

Post by jimbokun »

patio11 wrote: post #3
randrews wrote: post #2

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"?

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…

"Here's the directions to get to my house from the train station"

Which constitutes a large part of the answer to how directions are given in Japan: it is almost always relative to the nearest train station. "Go out the South exit, turn right at the Colonel Sanders statue and go two blocks past the Pachinko parlor..."

Re: Japanese addresses: No street names. Block numbers.

#22

Post by patio11 »

rend wrote: post #15
patio11 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Thank you for reminding me to update my whois record.

Re: Japanese addresses: No street names. Block numbers.

#24

Post by dkarl »

mattmaroon wrote: post #23

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.

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.

Re: Japanese addresses: No street names. Block numbers.

#26

Post by Semiapies »

oomkiller wrote: post #11

Much more efficient, but also much more boring.

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.

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