Japanese addresses: Weird, or just different?

I mean, I understand that the theme is true (different does not equal less correct), but I think in this case there’s a strong case that it’s more confusing and less useful to give each block an unique identifier instead of each road a unique identifier.

I’m speaking without personal experience. But from what I understand, you must know both have a destination and already know its block beforehand in order to find your destination. The house numberings are also “arbitrary” for location-finding purposes (based on the order the houses were constructed, I believe). If you want to know “the city” well enough to find a generic destination you must remember a lot of arbitrary information.

For instance, imagine a grid of 6 roads extending north-south and 6 extending east-west. There, you have 12 roads. But there are 25 blocks between those 12 roads. And on each of those blocks, the buildings may be location-arbitrarily numbered.

On the contrary, a street-based system, and especially a mostly logically numbered/lettered system like in (most of) NYC or Washington DC, requires you know know very little prior to finding an address. You either have to memorize a far more limited number of streets, or even simpler, the street naming convention (e.g., numbers ascending as one goes north).

I have nothing against Japanese custom and culture, and find this interesting. But I believe it is not simply “different,” but indeed less useful and less logical.

Living in countries with different systems, I can tell you no system (that I’ve seen) is perfect.

To a person unfamiliar with the geography, named streets (Canada) fail miserably to tell you where anything is. (Alphabetically ordered names are an exception)
The same goes for blocks numbered in an irregular fashion (Japan).
One would think streets numbered in a linear fashion (United States) would work … until you get to hilly terrain. When the non-contiguous streets start having the same number because they exist along the same imaginary line, and the same road starts having multiple numbers because it twists and winds along the countours of the land, that becomes annoying very quickly.

Of course, now that I live in the age of constant access to google maps from my GPS-enabled cell phone, I’ve never gotten lost in a Japanese city … while my battery lasts at least.

“Also the order of address is completely opposite.”

This also applies to names, since the last name comes first. I recall reading that Japanese is a “macro-micro” language (as is Korean), so that things go from big to small, as opposed to the other way around in the West.

Incorrect. The Japanese system has absolutely nothing to do with ancestry, and it is absolutely linear. Country, State, City, Ward, Region, Slice of region, Number. How is this not linear? Big, Smaller, Smallest. If the NA system is linear, so is the Japanese system.

Mathematically, there is absolutely no difference between the two. The only difference is in the order.

The US system superficially looks logical but it has not been implemented consistently so it can be as confusing to a visitor as any other.

For example, take New York. The east-west roads are labelled ‘streets’ and increment from the south of Manhattan. The north-south roads are labelled ‘avenues’ and increment from the east. But cross over to Queens and suddenly the streets are the north-south roads and increment from the west.

Go to Chicago and the ‘streets’ are the east-west roads but they increment from the north. Also, many of the avenues are not numbered, they have names.

The end result is you need a map to find your way around, wherever you go.

The Japanese system works fine once you understand it, as long as the local council has kept up the labelling on the lamp-posts. (In the area of my house, there are also maps on all the major corners, provided by the community association. They are well out of date, however.)

Personally I think these kind of differences are part of what makes visiting foreign countries fun and exciting.