Several houses near mine share exactly the same address. Just the other day, a visitor trying to find my home ended up wandering around the neighborhood.<\/p>\n
In Japan, it is not unusual for more than one house to have the same address. For postal and parcel delivery workers, that can mean they have to check one house after another before finding the right one.<\/p>\n
\u201cJapanese addresses are chaos,\u201d declares Taro Kawai, 52, with a wry smile.<\/p>\n
For 30 years, Kawai has worked with maps of Japan at major Japanese and American information technology companies\u00a0across the eras of paper maps, personal computers and smartphone apps.<\/p>\n
Japanese addresses, he says, are almost too diverse for their own good.<\/p>\n
There are Kyoto\u2019s distinctive addresses, which read almost like directions for walking to a destination. In some areas, the same town name followed by the syllable \u201ci\u201d can refer to two entirely different places, depending on whether the syllable is written in hiragana or katakana, Japan\u2019s two phonetic scripts.<\/p>\n
There are even buildings whose first and second floors belong to different municipalities.<\/p>\n
In one town, the name of a location\u00a0is written with two different Chinese characters, both meaning \u201cdragon.\u201d<\/p>\n
In another case, what looks like \u201c8-chome\u201d turns out not to mean the eighth numbered district at all. In Japanese addresses, \u201cchome\u201d usually refers to a numbered subdivision of a neighborhood, so \u201c8-chome\u201d would ordinarily mean \u201cthe eighth district.\u201d<\/p>\n
Here, however, Hacchome is the fixed name of the place itself.<\/p>\n
Engineers must classify all these maddeningly complex variations and distinctions so that computers can process addresses correctly; this\u00a0includes whether letters and numbers are entered as full-width or half-width characters.<\/p>\n
It is not hard to sympathize when Kawai says the confusion sometimes makes him want to cry out, \u201cLet\u2019s rebuild the entire system from scratch.\u201d<\/p>\n
Yet, when he visits a place and learns how its address came into being, he also discovers the history embedded in it.<\/p>\n
He has brought together this mixture of affection and exasperation in a book titled \u201cYabai Nihon no Jusho\u201d (Japan\u2019s outrageous addresses).<\/p>\n
Recently, the address industry has acquired a new helper: artificial intelligence.<\/p>\n
AI is becoming capable of recognizing even variations in spelling and simple writing errors.<\/p>\n
May it prove useful to the people who search for our homes in the punishing heat to deliver our mail and parcels.<\/p>\n
\u2014The Asahi Shimbun, July 27<\/p>\n
* * *<\/p>\n
Vox Populi, Vox Dei is a popular daily column that takes up a wide range of topics, including culture, arts and social trends and developments. Written by veteran Asahi Shimbun writers, the column provides useful perspectives on and insights into contemporary Japan and its culture.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Several houses near mine share exactly the same address. Just the other day, a visitor trying to find…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":64382,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[172,8,17,173,170,171],"class_list":["post-64381","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-japan","tag-asahi-shimbun","tag-japan","tag-japanese","tag-news","tag-opinion","tag-vox-populi"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64381","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=64381"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64381\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/64382"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=64381"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=64381"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=64381"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}