1. Are you using maps on android, iphone, or on the web? If on the web - did you open the maps.google.com page yourself, or did you arrive there by clicking the

1. Are you using maps on android, iphone, or on the web? If on the web - did you open the maps.google.com page yourself, or did you arrive there by clicking the maps link on some other page? I have generally been happy with google maps experience (mostly on android) here in Japan over the past several years. Other family members use it on their iPhones, and seem to prefer it to Apple maps. Google maps on web (If I use it, it is mostly in Chrome) sometimes acts very wonky when you arrive there by link from e.g. hotel webpage, travel-agency, or similar. (so navigate to maps.google.com is preferable). 2. Is the UI in English, or in Japanese? I have noticed a slight tendency on the web version to punish you for using Japanese terms in the English UI, and vice-versa, nothing as bad as the symptoms you are describing though. Also it seems like you know enough Japanese to understand the difference between 銭湯 (sento) and 温泉 (onsen) - just thought I'd mention that they are not the same , just in case a translation software threw you for a loop. 3. I don't think its punishing your for having location history off, but it might punishing you for having maps-search turned off - not sure about that. 4. Since you seem security-minded, is it possible you are also disallowing cookies or other JS functionality that might be affecting the behavior of the webapp?