Japanese addresses

Published: Nov 18, 2014 by Joe Larabell

This is just a quick note to help simplify the Japanese postal address system. It’s different from the system used in the US and many other countries but once you understand the theory, it’s really not that confusing.

Interestingly enough, there are several common phrases in Japanese which combine simple words in the exact opposite order from English: “white-and-black” instead of “black-and-white”, “right-and-left” instead of “left-and-right”, “out-and-in” instead of “in-and-out” just to name a few. Japanese addresses are also reversed from what you may be used to in English. For example, a typical US address would start with the name of the person or company, then the street address, followed by the city and state, and then the ZIP code (and finally the country, if you’re talking about an international parcel or letter). A Japanese address starts with the postal code. Then you list the prefecture and the city, in that order. Finally the name of the person or company at the end.

If you think about it, the Japanese system makes sense. The first thing a postal employee needs to know to deliver the item is the general area where it’s headed and that is represented by the postal code. They really don’t care about the receipent until the item ends up in the hands of the local letter carrier. So the information in a Japanese address is listed in the order it’s needed for delivery. Of course, US postal employees have long since learned to read the addresses from the bottom up but it does make one wonder why it’s written that way in the first place.

Japan is divided into 47 prefectures. Technically, it’s 43 prefectures (-ken), one metropolis (-to), two urban prefectures (-fu), and one island territory (-do) but when referred to collectively in English, the word prefecture is used (at least by Wikipedia). Each prefecture is divided into some number of “cities” (which may or may not be actual cities in the urban sense). There are many suffixes used for these cities in Japanese but you can almost always just add the name of the city immediately after the name of the prefecture.

From there, things vary by area. Since I’m most familiar with the scheme used in Tokyo, I will describe that in more detail. Other cities and urban areas work on the same general principle but the divisions may vary depending on local conditions (obviously a rural farming area doesn’t need quite as complex a scheme as Tokyo).

Tokyo is divided into 23 wards (-ku) and a number of other municipalities (-shi), each of which is fairly autonomous, much like a county in the US. Each ward and municiplity is divided into a number of named areas (with various suffices). The address progresses like the layers of an onion: after the prefecture and the city, you would add the name of the ward or municipality, followed by the name of the area. That’s the general pattern. Less populous areas might have one less layer to their onion than the wards inside of Tokyo but the onion principle stands.

So far, this may not seem different at all, save that there are more layers than you might find in most other places. But the big difference happens when you get to the granularity of the street address. The vast majority of the streets in Japan don’t have names (and those that do are never used in addresses). Instead, the onion pattern continues all the way down to the individual building. Each area within a ward or municipality will be divided into several numbered sections (-chome). Each block in one of these numbered sections is itself given a number and each building on the block is numbered, usually in the order they were constructed. So a typical “street address” might be something like:

108-0075 Tokyo-to, Minato-ku, Honan 2-16-3, Shinagawa Grand Central Tower, Microsoft Corporation, Japan.

The first set of numbers is the postal code. Tokyo is large enough to be considered a prefecture in its own right so that comes next. Then the name of the ward. Then the name of the area (in this case, the second “chome” of the Honan area). Then the block number (16) followed by the number of the building within that block (3). The building name is optional but helpful in case one of the numbers in the address is incorrect (yes… unlike in the US, if the postal carrier can identify the receipent despite an errant address, the item will often be delivered anyway).

This system explains the prevalence of maps in Japan. Just about every web site or advertisement for a shop or business will include a small map. There are neighborhood maps posted around train stations and at major intersections. There are also map applications that you can use on your computer or smartphone. And if you get lost, there are many police boxes (koban) where you can ask directions. They always have a very detailed map of the area you can refer to.

Some may argue that this is an antiquated system that only confuses residents but I’m not so sure. I’ve been in cities in both the US and Canada where even with a street address, you have no idea where a place is unless you’re from that area. It’s not at all unusual for streets that cross municipal boundaries to suddely take a huge jump in addresses right at the boundary and start decrementing when they were previously incrementing or vice-versa. Trying to find an unfamiliar place on a major street in Silicon Valley (California), for example, will drive you to drink and make you appreciate an onion-like model that pinpoints a location all the way down to a specific city block.

This post was originally published as: https://larabell.org/wordpress/japanese-addresses/

Legacy Comments:

The comments in this section were imported from the original WordPress post. If further comments are enabled for this post, you should find a Disqus form directly above this legacy comment section.

John Warner (2015-05-26):
Stumbled across one of your old web sites "Redac Reunion". Lots of familar names and memories. Lost touch with most. Interesting that we both worked at EDSG (72nd Engineering: FLIR's, Fire Control and later Digital Control of Analog Pointing Systems, HS signals leading to inferfaces with Green Field of Canada and Quantic labs), and Redac about the same time, but I do not remember meeting you. I worked for Denis Caten and later Lutz Henckels. Sato offered me "VP Technical Marketing America", but I turned him down after a statement and comment: "We are going to push CadStar and merge Visula into Zuken" and "Do you speak Japonese?" I could not see being the next John Barr. Funny considering that I would later learn Korean and Putung Hua! I would travel to Kyoto to work an interface with Fuji for LG (who would not work directly with them!). Missed the big one there by days. Did not miss the big one in Taipei a few years later. Spent most of the rest of days designing assembly and test plants around Shang Hai and later Cheng Du. Retired to the Sierra Foothills. I still have fun playing with simulation and keeping up with new languages and other tech while playing urban cowboy on my ranch. Say hello if you see this, and remember "Now You Can!" (Yes, spent some time demoing vapor ware!) John Warner Former Western Regional Field Engineering Manger, Racal Redac U.S.A.

Latest Posts

Effortless Magick

It’s funny how, every once in a while, if you listen to the subtle messages unfolding around you on a constant basis, you pick up on a pattern of small bits of information that seem to build into something substantial. That happened to me recently on the general topic of effortlessness. Like many would-be adepts, I have a number of daily practices that I fit into various parts of the day. Sometimes they pay off with feelings of increased awareness or energy but, if I were being totally honest, most of the time they feel like drudge-work… a part of the day that occurs more out of habit than anything else… with the basic idea being one of consistency rather than joy.

Read more

Published: Dec 7, 2019

Out with the Old...

I was listening to the latest Sam Harris podcast today and ran across an interesting take on something that should be familiar to most Western Ceremonial Magicians. Eric Weinstein was talking about finding meaning in license plate numbers as he drives around (don’t we all do that when we first start on the Path?) and the way he explained it was:

"...it's important to notice what it feels like to discern meaning where there is no meaning... it's important to get in touch with the "as if madness" experience in order to guard against madness; so I'm hoping to suspend my insistence on Truth for periods of time..."

I’m not sure about the connection with madness, per-se… and I’m wondering if that wasn’t just a ploy designed to wrap up the thought before getting interrupted. I realized when he said that that another good reason for discerning meaning where there is none is to prevent intellectual ossification (my term… it didn’t appear in the podcast, as far as I know). The belief that one particular way of looking at things must serve as the filter through which we see everything else from that point forward seems to be common in most philosophies and pretty much all religions. Adherence to a strict theology makes us less able to evaluate contrary ideas on their own merit. On the other hand, by constantly playing fast and loose with one’s synaptic network, so to speak, one might stand a chance of maintaining enough mental flexibility to recognize a true Epiphany when it finally does come.

It’s ironic that avoiding intellectual ossification was one of the main points that Sam was trying to convey just moments earlier… that there’s no logical reason to use one or more points-of-view which happen to have been elaborated thousands of years ago over new points-of-view developed by one’s own reason in the present time. Of course, that’s easier said than done and when most people start on any sort of Philosophical or Spiritual Path, they’re usually not capable of the kind of deep reasoning that would discern the “true meaning” of the Universe at first glance… so we may need to use ancient philosophy and religion as a crutch for a while… in order to bootstrap our thinking to the point where we can reason with some depth on the Universe and our purpose within it. But I expect that we all have to eventually drop the rhetoric and design our own systems based on First Principles.

Read more

Published: Jan 8, 2018

Misunderstanding Multitasking

I was listening to an interview with the authors of the new book The Distracted Mind on NPR this morning and they touched on a favorite pet peeve of mine that centers on a basic misunderstanding of the term multitasking. According to Wikipedia, the first published use of the term “multitask” appeared in an IBM paper describing the capabilities of the IBM System/360 in 1965. Is is only recently that the term has been used in the common vernacular to refer to the apparent ability of humans to “concentrate” on more than one task at a time.

Read more