The streets have no name
I was invited to a barbecue earlier in O-bon week. But not at my friend’s own house, at a relative’s place. And having never been there before, it took some finding.
If you’ve never been to Japan before, it may surprise you to know that roads have no names, and houses have no street numbers.
OK, major roads have numbers. (Though this is not necessarily helpful. Two different roads where I live have the same number.) And in city centres, some major avenues have names. But in residential areas, forget it.
So how do you find anyone’s house, you’re thinking? Well, usually it involves heading in the right vague direction and phoning your friend when you arrive at some particular landmark, where your friend can come and meet you, or is already waiting.
That’s not to say that Japanese houses don’t have addresses. Of course they do. But they’re a convaluted and complicated code understood only by the geniuses at the Post Office. The idea of any convenience to the general public has been entirely left out.
Each city and town is divided into smaller, named areas. This can be difficult for a new arrival. You won’t know most of the names, and this will inexplicably amaze most locals, who will name some place you will assume to be a faraway town, but what in fact turns out to mean “just down there, and round that corner”.
And each of these areas is divided into numbered areas. And depending on whether we’re talking about a village or a city, we keep paring down with more numbers until we get to an individual building. There is usually no geographical basis to these numbers (it’s more likely based on the order the buildings were built), so give up any idea of finding a place simply because you have the address.
So basically, the entire reason for this post is that by the time we arrived at this barbecue, all the best bits had been eaten or burnt, and everyone else was drunk and beyond caring.
I am one of the worst people in the world when it comes to driving in the right direction. My life was simplified tremendously and my fights with Mrs. JP were reduced by more than half by installation of a GPS Car Navi in the Japunditmobile.
August 16th, 2008 at 6:10 pmThis may possibly be due to JP’s penchant for taking any and every opportunity to drive through rice fields.
Meanwhile, I seem to be one of the few gaijin who actually thinks the Japanese address system is relatively logical and easy to work with. I’d much rather navigate to, for example: Tokyo, Shinagawa-ku, Higashi Gotanda 4-15-7 than try to find 11,357 Navigational Court (as opposed to Navigational Drive or Navigational Ave) in Los Angeles.
August 16th, 2008 at 9:15 pmBut Mr P, if you have an A-Z of Los Angeles, it’d take 30 seconds to find your exact destination, long before you set off. (Surely such things don’t only exist in England?)
August 16th, 2008 at 9:43 pmI live in a small residential area with no more than 300 houses. It’s called Higashiyama, meaning East Mountain, but as you said, areas have areas that contain areas containing areas, some numbered, some named. Confusingly, it turns out I live in Kita Nishi Higashiyama, meaning, of course, North West East Mountain, and that’s before you throw some random numbers on the end.
August 16th, 2008 at 10:43 pmOk, so I haven’t tried this for addresses in rural Japan, but try out the online map sites:
August 17th, 2008 at 2:57 amhttp://map.yahoo.co.jp/
http://maps.google.co.jp/
The satellite view for google can be great also. I think urban areas even have decent coverage for street view.
anybody who can navigate this..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Magic_Roundabout_Schild_db.jpg
can feel confident on any road anywhere including this place.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KD5YnjKdcao&NR=1
beep!beep!
remora
August 17th, 2008 at 3:25 amDiddlefinger.com is useful for those who can’t handle the kanji. Detailed maps of Japan with romaji place names.
I have to agree with Mr. P. If you have a map, it’s easier to find someplace by the Japanese system. A to Z is a nice idea, until you open it to find that London is filled with little streets the length of my hallway that like to adopt new names every 20 steps. In Japan, it’s find the ku, find the cho and then find the building number. It zooms in neatly.
That said, I find that many Japanese can’t read maps well, and fewer can draw one. In the latter case, a map from an advert may be drawn to a variety of scales. A little line here is 50 meters, while the next little line is 12 km. And the choice of landmarks can be odd. Though pachinko parlors are by far the easiest building to spot, Japanese will invariably put the mom and pop rice store on the map instead.
And, I am a big fan of the post office, though - the best in the world.
August 17th, 2008 at 8:04 amIf we’re talking about weird address systems, I’d match Salt Lake City up against most other places I’ve been. Try finding a shop that tells you it’s located at 1300 South 700 East — even with a map I’ll bet six-pack of Polygamy Porter (Why Stop at One!) you get hopelessly lost the first try.
August 17th, 2008 at 10:42 amMr.Pink - it’s just around the block from Donny & Marie’s Last Chance Bar N’Grill.
REM.
August 17th, 2008 at 12:04 pmWhen I lived in Tokyo years ago the convention was to print business cards that showed a map on the back. The map would show the location of the office, hotel, shop, or apartment complex relative to the nearest subway or train station. You collected the cards to have a way to get back to where you had been. The taxi drivers knew where all the stations were, but they would often need to study the map to find a specific address. With GPS and computer maps, that’s probably changed at least somewhat now.
The worst part of trying to follow a map was deciding what was a “street” and hence shown on the map, versus an alley or other non-street that was omitted.
August 18th, 2008 at 2:47 amMaps on business cards are still used, OldOne, and maps here are generally just as useless as they have always been.
Some problems with hand-drawn and other “unofficial” maps are:
1. Blocks are not blocks.
2. Intersecting streets often are omitted for simplicity.
3. What is depicted as a straight shot often is the concept of michi-nari, which means “follows the road you are on no matter how much it bends and turns.”
4. Housing lots are numbered in the sequence that buildings were built upon them, rather than according to some logical grid. (At least in Tokyo.)
August 18th, 2008 at 9:04 amMy wife usually hands me those stylized “maps.” The first thing I do is pull out a real map and locate where it is - otherwise, forget it. There must be some relation between the abstract art of calligraphy and map drawing.
August 18th, 2008 at 12:24 pm“There is usually no geographical basis to these numbers (it’s more likely based on the order the buildings were built)…”
My understanding is that was only the case in the early postwar years, and that now building numbers are assigned in numerical order. All the neighborhoods where I lived in Tokyo seemed to use the latter system.
August 19th, 2008 at 11:51 am