A 丁目 is a small section of a 町 or a 区 or other division of a city. It might be about 15-50 blocks in size.

The next number is the block number. The number after that is the building number. So ２丁目-１−１ is building #1 of block #1 of 2丁目.

The tricky part is that unlike American addresses, the blocks and the buildings are not numbered in consecutive order. Often block 31 will be right by block 32, but not always, because sometimes they went back and filled one in after the blocks were already numbered. Same thing for buildings.

There's really a ridiculous amount of arbitrariness to it and you need to use either a very detailed paper map or a map web site -- this is why stores will often have little maps on their ads/flyers.

Guess the system just evolved, Sendai - hence buildings being numbered in the order of construction or whatever it is they have going on there.  Something that's perfectly workable on a village scale, but which gets pretty wild once the former hamlet expands into a city.

Bet computerization and GPS mapping have made life a lot easier on the ground. 

Wonder what they do in newer areas?  Do they still follow the old convention there?  Anyone know?

Last edited by warrigal (2013 February 06, 10:03 pm)

SendaiDan wrote:

I never understood why they would implement such a system in the first place. Surely using street names and numbers like 99% of the world does would be far easier...

I'm gonna add this comment to the pile along with things like "Using forks like 99% of the world does would be far easier..."

I'm sure if they could plan for scratch they might choose to do things differently, but Japan has had this address system since the 1860's. At the time they were implementing this system, what you consider to be "like 99% of the world" was not in fact "like 99% of the world," at that time. The street name system you're referring to is younger or the same age as the Japanese system.

Also, Sapporo, a city in Japan that was built very recently, does actually use a street-based system in their addressing. The thing you have to remember about Japan is that the concept of what constitutes a road is not at all standardized. Frequently they don't have names. Frequently they're barely wide enough for 1 car. They also tend to conform to geography moreso than to an arbitrary geometric grid. There's tiny roads everywhere that loop every which way.

So it would really just replace the current system with a different, but probably equally as flawed, system for a benefit that I can't really think of.

Last edited by erlog (2013 February 06, 11:26 pm)

erlog, I was thinking that it's much like English spelling - something rooted deep in local history which preserves evidence of growth over time as do archaeological strata, or tree rings.  And like English spelling, it is both familiar and enmeshed in the culture, and it'd take a fair bit of skin off were there a serious attempt to change it wholesale now.  "Eight" and "enough" are crazy-looking words which make no immediate phonetic sense, but they hint at times past in those odd stacks of letters.  I think, secretly or not so secretly, many cultures are proud of these home-grown bits of (to an outsider) apparent eccentricity, not least because they often fossilize an older and perhaps long-lost scheme of order and meaning - old mores, old conventions, old pronunciation, old precedent, and sometimes just old whimsy or old accidents of history, and why not?  If you grow up with it, it just is what it is, and is part of your mental furniture (which is not to say you'll never have reason to curse it yourself!) 

The Wikipedia article on Japanese addresses is a good read (and very gratifying to anyone well into RTK, too!)

Now I'm wondering whether there were/are the equivalent of London cab exams on "The Knowledge" for police/postal/emergency response crews. 

ETA:  The chronological numbering of buildings aside, this is simply thinking about the blocks as anchoring your orientation, not the thoroughfares, just as you can describe a Hermann illusion as either a white grid on a black background or black blocks on white.

Last edited by warrigal (2013 February 07, 12:42 am)

I can see where you were coming from as well, SendaiDan - it's interesting to see what happens when people get a chance to redo things literally from the ground up.  Makes us all stop and think about our assumptions about "this is how it is", and not just in this context.

You got me thinking about how much of that which we take for granted in a given culture often wasn't so much designed as evolved.

Last edited by warrigal (2013 February 07, 12:51 am)

This thread reminds me of an old TED talk.

http://www.ted.com/talks/derek_sivers_w … erent.html

EDIT: Just watched the video and read some of the comments below it, including this one:

Sep 26 2012: I like this talk, but it is not true that the buildings are numbered in the order they were built in Japan. in the new system ("jukyo hyoji"), a building is numbered in geographical order, although it is not as obvious as in US because a block is not linear. In the old system ("chiban"), which is still used in many areas of Japan, a building number is associated with the land ownership. In either case it is not relevant when the building was built.

Last edited by Oniichan (2013 February 07, 1:06 am)

One's a republic, one is a constitutional monarchy, and in our European street system, you gotta pick names - I'm guessing the USA went for Enlightenment rationality while our colonial governors looked to their sponsors, their royal family, and distinguished friends/patrons.  One side of the pond drives on the right, the other on the left <g>.  It's fun to dig into the origins of the conventions, and you've sent me off to Google it all again.

Onniichan, thanks for highlighting the comment under the (excellent) TED link re the origins of the house numbers in Japan (tied to ownership rather than when the building was built as I first assumed).  There's a popular TV show, made in the UK and shown here in Australia, called Time Team.  One thing that struck me, watching it, was how remarkably well-preserved real-estate footprints tend to be over time.  Sometimes an area will be razed, rebuilt, or a large estate or commons broken up and completely reconfigured, but so often the record office and field work demonstrated that a modern streetscape's property lines reflect a mediaeval town plan to within inches.  Where there is stable title, it tends to preserve frontages and footage (which seems terribly obvious but which wasn't, for some reason.)

There's a fun internet meme comparing the street layout of New York and Boston, too.  One's a tidy grid, the other ... isn't.

ETA:  In the suburb in which I grew up, there was a small section whose street configuration always puzzled me.  Odd angles, triangular blocks, loop roads, odd dead-ends.  And then one day I discovered that the blocks concerned had been resumed during WWII for a US Naval hospital.  They'd leveled the existing houses (but not, let us take note, the local pub), and laid down internal roads within the camp grounds.  When the war ended, and the base reverted to civilian use, the council kept the surfaced camp roads and re-carved the area back into suburban blocks.  There won't be too many cities that don't have similar stories somewhere.

Last edited by warrigal (2013 February 07, 1:51 am)

Am confident that Curtin was very firm with MacArthur on this point.  Morale, you know.  You can live in a tent if you've still got your local.  Anyway, back to Japanese streets ..... I'm feeling a lot better about my struggles with the tourist map while I was over there!

Last edited by warrigal (2013 February 07, 1:50 am)

yudantaiteki wrote:

JSL suggests that this practice is a reflection of the uchi-soto distinction, and that traditionally there's been no real need to have an easy way for someone to find your house without you telling them how to get there.  Even now it's not as common in Japan as it is in the US for people to visit your house or apartment.

I really don't want to take this thread off topic but...I was talking about this exactly with a Korean friend I met in Japan only earlier today. I was saying how if I went back for a holiday I have a feeling that my Japanese friends would be unlikely to invite me to stay at their place, whereas if I went to visit a country where one of my non-Japanese friends lived, I have no doubt at all they would ask me to stay (and I wouldn't feel rude if I asked either). She totally agreed with me. I guess this is due to the fact that I was never invited to a Japanese friend's place while I lived there - we always met in the city at a bar, izakaya, restaurant, cafe etc.