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Japanese addressing system
- Sir_Cmpwn 7y agoHello 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.
- Numberwang 7y agoI've traveled a lot and Osaka holds a special place in my heart. I felt so peaceful and relaxed, despite being a major city.
- eloisant 7y agoOr, you can go to Europe that have an organic layout like in Japan but street names and numbers like in US. So you can have a pleasant experience following an inefficient route but still reach your destination.
- trickstra 7y agoThat organic tree-like structure is often more efficient than always taking only 90 degree turns
- throw0101a 7y agoObligatory "Falsehoods programmers believe about addresses" * https://www.mjt.me.uk/posts/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-addresses/ https://www.mjt.me.uk/posts/falsehoods-programmers-believe-a... * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5791489 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5791489 (2013) * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8907301 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8907301 (2015) * https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=mjt.me.uk https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=mjt.me.uk
- jen729w 7y agoMy UK-centric view of addresses caused me an unnecessary and unpleasant 3kms walk, backpack-laden, in high summer Sydney heat back in 2003. Turns out “100 Some Road” can exist in multiple contiguous suburbs here in Australia. The numbering for the road re-starts at a suburb boundary! Who knew? This means that, upon exiting a train station and seeing number 2, 4, 6... to your left, you can’t walk left and find the 100 you’re looking for. You might be in the wrong suburb, and your number 100 might in fact be to your right. I remember that day like it was yesterday. 2nd December 2003. I’m an Australian now, but I had the good sense to move to Melbourne. ;-)
- blahedo 7y agoMany parts of the US are the same. Even worse: there are areas in the Chicago suburbs (I presume other cities' suburbs too) where since a town boundary runs down the middle of the street, the numbering on opposite sides of the street are actually going in different directions, because they are relative to two different town numbering systems. O.o
- ghaff 7y agoThis and problems like this are rampant in New England which is mostly covered by a lot of smaller towns (with a few large cities of course). Basically everything usually resets at a town boundary. Sometimes the name changes. Sometimes it doesn't. But numbers almost always reset. And, even within a town, it's not unusual for streets to change name a couple times in the course of a few miles. And towns reuse street names all the time--especially for things like Main Street.
- hibbelig 7y ago> And, even within a town, it's not unusual for streets to change name a couple times in the course of a few miles. You say that as if it was a bad thing. This idea that a "street" is a line on the map, and whether there is actually asphalt at that spot is yet to be defined -- this is a very strange idea to me. If I get to the right street, I expect to be able to follow it until I get to the correct address. Streets with gaps in them don't work so well for this. Yes, if the city is laid out in a rectangular grid, that has its advantags, too. But I just want to point out a different way to look at things. (European perspective.)
- mempko 7y agoWhen 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.
- stuartcw 7y agoI 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.
- mholt 7y agoAs an engineer who did this for US addresses for about 6 years, my hat goes off to you. salute
- jspash 7y agoThere is something deeply satisfying to me when a non-technical solution (sending a postcard) is used to solve what could be seen as a purely technical problem. But I suppose it depends on which department is in charge of the project. In the places I've worked, if the project is deemed to be IT-related in any way, a "meatspace" solution like this would never see the light of day.
- xanipher 7y agoHow is this a purely technical problem? I'd argue it's a purely non-technical problem, especially in the many cases where e.g. the postal worker needs some implicit knowledge to make the right decisions.
- asutekku 7y agoI 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)
- freddie_mercury 7y agoI 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.
- peteretep 7y ago> don't have the numbering system that Americans take for granted I’ll take a second to point out that American addresses are bizarre to many Europeans, for the same reason that your dates are; the room number or suite number is written _after_ the street number. Random addendum: in the UK, a postcode plus a small number will accurately identify most addresses, and when entering an address online you’ll be asked for a postcode and then prompted to choose from about 20 residences or businesses that that could be
- techdragon 7y agoA small but possibly interesting addendum to this European/American split on suite/apartment number placement... Here in Australia, they both work fine and seem to be widely interchangeable. Many systems I’ve used don’t force either choice and simply let me put it in as “address line one” and “address line two”. Australia Post, DHL, and basically everyone I’ve ever sent/received mail or parcels using, seem to be totally fine handling both of these formats in Australia.
- bane 7y agoKorea used a similar system but is transitioning to a newer system that is more like what is used in the West. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Addresses_in_South_Korea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Addresses_in_South_Korea
- userbinator 7y agoWhen written in Japanese characters, addresses start with the largest geographical entity and proceed to the most specific one. When written in Latin characters, addresses follow the convention used by most Western addresses and start with the smallest geographic entity (typically a house number) and proceed to the largest. Big and little-endian, in other words.
- needle0 7y agoI don't quite get why the latter became widespread in the west, though - we read text from top to bottom, we pinpoint addresses by drilling going from the largest geographical entries down to the smallest, why make them go reverse against each other?
- saghm 7y agoOne benefit I can think of is that the volume of addresses that the average person reads tends to decrease with distance from the person's home. This means that in a left-to-right, top-to-bottom language, you can start reading from the beginning of the address, and as it gets more general, eventually you hit a point where it becomes identical to your address for the rest of it, so you can stop reading. For example, when reading an address in the city I live in, I can read the number and the street, and then once I see the city name, I can stop, since I know everything I need to. This would be a bit more difficult if you had to start from the bottom right and work your way backwards, so I'm guessing that the ordering was chosen to maximize efficiency for those common, local cases.
- actsof 7y agoExactly, it's the same reason most date formats don't start with the year, even though it is the most significant of the numbers. If I write 12-8-2019, the 12 is the most important number for me, in speech I will usually refer to the date as "the 12th". In the same way, if I'm telling my address to someone, I'll just say the street address, since we can assume I live in the country we're in right now (which of course doesn't work on the internet, hence we specify additional information at the end).
- colechristensen 7y agoOnly thirty years ago (I'm having trouble finding the exact date of switchover) rural addresses in Iowa were of the form Box #123 RR 456 (RR for Rural Route) City, IA 50000 (city of nearest post office) The replacement started in the 1990s was called something like 911 address because nobody but the postman could easily navigate to your home unless they already knew. Country roads didn't have names.
- techsupporter 7y agoThat's what they were called in Texas, too, "911 address." Before that, people who got mail delivery to their houses usually used some form of [lot number] [locally-known street or platted subdivision]. If you owned multiple lots, you used multiple numbers. My grandparents' address was something like "10-11-12 Rocking Ranch, Middleofnowhere TX 75333." After 911 addressing, it became the usual format but the street names were assigned by the county if you weren't in a city. Then there were the people who didn't get mail delivery so all they had was a PO box. To this day, there are people who still only have a PO box as their "real address" and they have to go get a 911 address assigned from the Postmaster or their county when they renew their voter registration or state ID because the state decided a few years ago that PO boxes weren't real addresses for voting or having on a license. The address still doesn't work for mail delivery, it's just to fulfill a location rule.
- peteretep 7y agoIf I had the time and knowledge, I’d add a whole bunch more examples and graphics to this page
- enlyth 7y agoI moved to the UK more than five years ago and cannot get enough of this algorithmic postcode system here. It narrows down almost to the house on some occasions, while postcodes in my home country are basically "within 100 miles".
- leeoniya 7y agoCanada's postal codes are also like this.
- bmsleight_ 7y agoAlso if a address get more than 20 items of mail per day. The Post Office will give you your own post code.
- kbouck 7y agoOn a trip to Tokyo we had challenges locating a restaurant based on the address. Despite handing the address to the taxi driver, we got to the block, but the driver couldn't locate the restaurant. He had to call the restaurant to have someone come outside and wave us in. Left us wondering how that addressing system works. From the article i'm guessing this would have been a "banchi" block, where numbers were assigned in order of registration.
- hawkjo 7y agoYeah, you got it. Building numbers—banchi blocks—label the age of the building, not its position in space. The only people for whom many addresses are physically findable seems to be people from the neighborhood who have memorized the arbitrary number of each building. Google maps is a blessed thing generally, but an absolute godsend when visiting Japan.
- malloryerik 7y agoI wonder if it wouldn't make sense to use GPS coordinates.
- GeneralTspoon 7y agoToo precise I think - you can have multiple GPS coordinates for one address e.g. 2.00000000001 and 2.00000000002 could both be on the same building. Even a bounding box is too error prone. Also, verticality would be an issue.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- 1023bytes 7y agoThat's what they do for car navigation, but they use a proprietary system called Mapcodes instead of just GPS. Some sat-navs there won't even let you input GPS coordinates and you have to convert them to this first.
- ghaff 7y agoI've travelled to Japan a number of times over the past 10+ years. So, pre-smartphone to full mobile/data/maps/e-guidebook with Google Maps links/etc. Also Google Translate (although in practice I find that less useful). What a difference it's made to getting around! I recall going back a number of years finding many specific things could be a real challenge. I remember wandering around for an hour once trying to find our office.
- magicbuzz 7y agoWithout smartphone was tough in Japan. But streetview was great. I’d put an address in, then look at each corner to ensure I knew what each turn looked like after arriving at the local station to get to the specific address.
- orthoxerox 7y agoWe have two countrywide address encoding systems that encode the address as a strict hierarchy, but both fail to encode the legal address of one of our customers, which is something like "1500m down the dirt road starting at the 27th km of the TownFoo-TownBar road". No house number, no street name, no town name.
- Moru 7y agoWhat about P.O. BOX 52, Nearest_town_name.
- jillesvangurp 7y agoOne of my friends wrote an article about geocoding a few years ago: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jan/13/google-maps-geocoder https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jan/13/google-ma... In short, addressing and geocoding is a hard problem and there are lots of weird edge cases. The web is full of broken assumptions about addresses, post codes, etc.
- gumby 7y agoThe stories in this discussion make it easier for me to understand my grandmother’s refusal to adopt a house number when South Australia assigned them (50s? 60s?). Up into the 90s when she moved into a unit she insisted on using just name of her house, and it appeared to work just fine. And it’s not like she lived in some grand house; just an ordinary single family house. I walked by it last year and the current owners have a number on the gate (up I had never known what it was); my cousin kept the house name plate that unused to hang there.