UNBELIEVABLE! Streets Are Not Named In Japan: See How People Find Their Way!

Before the widespread use of the smartphone and GPS technology, finding addresses in Japan was a real quest.

As recently as the noughties, trying to track down where someone lived or where the office of a small company resided could take hours of mindless and desperate roaming.

You may think finding your way around a foreign metropolis is tricky enough, but spare a thought for those who inhabit a city where the streets have no names. Tokyo, like most cities and towns in Japan, only has a few road names for the major thoroughfares and these are, for lack of a better word, for ceremonial purposes.

Named roads don’t feature on addresses. Instead, the postal system is like the one used in ancient Rome where urban congregations are split first into areas, then wards, then other subdivisions. Therefore a Japanese address is based on buildings alone – not the spaces in between them, i.e. streets.

An address in Japan starts with the city, then zeroes in on the ku or ward (in the case of a capital filled with 33 million souls, a ward is a small city in itself). It then zooms in further to identify the specific area of the ward, before naming the block number or chōme within that area.

For example: you may find yourself looking for a house in Tokyo, in the Shibuya ward, inside Ebisu area’s third block. But here the fun is only just beginning. The chōme are not neatly placed in order, so you will find that Ebisu-1 sits next to Ebisu-4. It gets trickier. Each of the chōme, which might take a good 15-20 minutes to circumnavigate, is split two more times with the numbering of these subdivisions based on a chronological order of construction, not geographic proximity.

Google Maps has not solved everything. Often your GPS-based map will dump you somewhere in the vicinity of the place you are aiming for, leaving you to finish the job.