Japanese Addresses: the opposite is also true [video]

http://sivers.org/jaddr

by stakent • 17 years ago

53 19 17 years ago

sivers.org

lisper• 17 years ago

Um, I was just in Japan and streets definitely have names. For example, this is in Nagasaki:

http://flownet.com/ron/fukken_street.jpg

chrischen• 17 years ago

Yea I would imagine it'd be pretty hard to give directions without street names.

sivers• 17 years ago

"Most Japanese streets do not have names" from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_addressing_system

wheels• 17 years ago

Taking the original post at face value, that would be like showing up in New York and saying, "Blocks definitely have names. See, right there it says, Madison Square."

mullr• 17 years ago

The street outside my window in Kobe has a name because it's pretty major, but the two running orthogonal to it on each side of my block don't. This is typical. IIRC Sapporo has a western style street system, and is laid out on a grid, but otherwise the video is correct.

Meeting points and directions are generally expressed in terms of landmarks like train stations.

The system isn't really that strange. We (in america) use the same system of space decomposition for states, counties, and (in some places) cities. This just continues breaking it down to city regions (区), district name, chunk of blocks（丁目), block number, and finally house number. It's consistent with the larger scale system, and it handles change pretty gracefully.

BigDamnDeal• 17 years ago

So how do you give directions? I know you must have a system, but I'm not sure exactly how it works. "Head down to Block 16, take a left and turn right at block 22"?

twopoint718• 17 years ago

It seemed to me that in Tokyo many streets had names. It seemed more likely to have a name if it was multiple lanes and ran more or less straight for a significant distance.

Also, to me the word "opposite" seems misplaced. I think that "complimentary" would be more apt. It follows that adage that whenever there is more than one way to do something someone will choose each.

rwmj• 17 years ago

But getting to places in Japan is still stupidly difficult, even when you have local knowledge. Street naming is a better system because we walk along streets, not blocks. Unless you're Godzilla ..

patio11• 17 years ago

That has not been my experience, and my direction sense is nil. The address system also has not harmed the Japanese distribution industry, which is quite possibly the most efficient in the world.

(These days all the routing is computerized, but prior to that all routing made use of the fact that Japanese addresses get progressively more specific. You used that to sort the parcel at every location so that it got to a distribution center closer to the destination, at which point one of your carriers who had worked in that neighborhood for years would get it directly to the proper door.)

sorbits• 17 years ago

Sounds similar to sorting by zip code.

I don’t know how many postmen share each zip code. In Copenhagen the western district has been sub-divided into a lot of zip codes so it could be that each is its own route, but they only did it for the western district, the other districts still only have a single zip code — I suspect that they did it to simplify sorting but found that people are more likely to make mistakes (when you have a dozen zip codes for the colloquially same district).

earthboundkid2• 17 years ago

The Japanese system is better for finding a place on a map. If someone says, "3211 Birch St., Hickton" that could be anywhere in the city. If they say, "Hickton, West-区, Birch-町 3-2-11" you know to first look for the western part, then find the Birch area, then neighborhood 3, block 2, house 11.

Anyway, GPS makes the whole issue moot. Use your damn iPhone!

SeanLuke• 17 years ago

Even the the Japanese will readily admit that the Japanese system is a nightmare. Because elements are either named arbitrarily (the name of the town, or prefecture, or area, or whatever) or are named in the order they were established (district 9, or block 4, or house 2) finding them is essentially a hash lookup at every level.

"Sure", you say, "but streets are also arbitrarily named". Occasionally true. But there are many fewer of them than there are of blocks or buildings. Streets are long. If I say I need to get to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, a taxi driver in DC knows exactly where Pennsylvania Avenue is -- or only needs to look up that one name -- and can go right there. If I say I need to get to 3-14-13, Higashi-gotanda, Shinagawa-ku, Tokyo 141 Japan, then the taxi driver starts pulling out his street atlas. Okay I know where Shinagawa-ku is. Next, where's Gotanda, okay. Where's Higashi, district 13? Okay. Where's block 14? Building 3? Now, how do I get there? That's a lot of lookups, every one of which is randomized.

The opposite of this hideous mess is how things are laid out in, of all places, Utah. Mormon settlements were laid out intelligently on a grid. The axes of the grid are the only streets with names --well, in the original plan anyway -- (In Salt Lake City it's State Street and South Temple Street). The remaining streets are named for the tick location on the grid on which they reside. Heading west from the origin, we have 100 West, 200 West, 300 West, etc. Heading south from the origin, we have 100 South, 200 South, 300 South, etc. Your address is also a number: if you're on 200 South, and your house is, say, a quarter of the way between 200 West and 300 West, then your address is 225 West 200 South. In a design like this you don't even need a map.

Mz2• 17 years ago

As I understand it, at least some Japanese cities were intentionally designed to be "stupidly difficult" to get around. The purpose was to make it more difficult to successfully invade them.

ojbyrne• 17 years ago

The conclusion of this was very much in line with my proverb that "every proverb has an equal and opposite counterpart."

wglb• 17 years ago

This is a very nice post showing that sometime you need to go far away to see what assumptions you are quite unaware that you are holding.

Mz2• 17 years ago

A couple of completely unrelated thoughts:

Even in America, there isn't necessarily some standard format for giving directions. If you spend any time around career military folks, they tend to give directions which include north, south, east and west as a critical part of the explanation. Many civilians cannot make heads nor tails of such directions.

I am reminded of an anecdote (probably from Reader's Digest) where an American man working with a Japanese company was frustrated at his inability to get on the same page with these folks. One day when things finally seemed to be getting better, he remarked they were "thinking along parallel lines". The Japanese man agreed. Some time later when they were again at an impasse, he referenced that discussion. The Japanese man then replied "Parallel lines never meet".

ugh• 17 years ago

In the German city Mannheim streets also don’t have names, blocks do. Well, only in the old city center, but still.

Mannheim’s old city center has these regular, almost quadratic blocks (called „Quadrate“) which are very unusual to find in any European city. If those regular shaped blocks made Mannheim name its blocks, not streets, why didn’t the same thing happen in the US (where those kinds of blocks are much more common) at least once? I think that’s a intriguing question.

http://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Datei:Mannheim_Inn... (Photo)

http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadratestadt (sadly, only in German)

Japanese Addresses: the opposite is also true [video]

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