[HN Gopher] Japanese addresses: No street names. Block numbers (...
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Japanese addresses: No street names. Block numbers (2009)
Author : rmason
Score : 49 points
Date : 2024-06-14 02:20 UTC (20 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (sive.rs)
(TXT) w3m dump (sive.rs)
| gnabgib wrote:
| (2009) Some discussion over the years:
|
| 57 points, 15 years ago, 25 comments
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=668197
|
| 36 points, 7 years ago, 10 comments
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15616782
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| How does giving directions work in Japan?
|
| I'm struggling to understand how this would translate, "Go north
| three miles on High St. Turn left onto 2nd street and go 500m.
| Then take Park Ave south for 100m."
| kbolino wrote:
| As far as I can tell, in a dense Japanese city, directions
| start relative to a particular train station, then use
| distances and landmarks to go from there.
| redwall_hp wrote:
| That's pretty much how directions work outside of major
| cities in the US too, except for a lack of train stations,
| and the more rural you get the more landmarks are replaced
| with shibboleths.
|
| "Go about ten minutes that way until you see the old Smith
| farm. [The Smiths haven't lived there for three generations.]
| Then take a left and head five minutes down Mill Road. [It's
| actually called something else, has never had a mill on it in
| its entire history, but is called that by the locals
| nonetheless.]" Eventually you start wondering when you
| tripped and fell into a Discworld novel.
| jiveturkey wrote:
| I even hear these kind of place names on fire/police radio.
| thatswrong0 wrote:
| When I was in Tokyo, it was basically:
|
| 1) Go to / be pointed the nearest train station, then ask
| random people for help close by if still can't see the number
| somewhere or parse the names. People all over are super willing
| to help even with a language barrier. They'll usually point you
| up a few streets, at landmarks, or general direction. I'd often
| end up having to ask like 4 people on the way lol
|
| 2) If you're meeting with friends, you meet at the train
| station then go from there.
|
| I don't know how anyone got around there before mapping
| software.
| resolutebat wrote:
| I lived in Tokyo before Google Maps, and the answer was:
| printed maps. Every business card had a map on the back,
| every invitation to somebody's house (not a common occurrence
| in Japan, mind you) had a hand-drawn map. But if you were
| going somewhere as a group, you'd meet at a known point
| (outside train station etc) and then head over together,
| since somebody would know where you were going.
|
| If you were roughing it on your own and only had the address,
| things got more interesting. Train stations always had
| detailed maps of major landmarks, so finding those was not an
| issue. If you were looking for something too small to be
| covered (say, a restaurant), you'd head to the chome and then
| start winnowing down. Police boxes (koban) always had
| detailed neighborhood maps, albeit usually in handwritten
| Japanese only, and you could ask the cops for directions too.
|
| The final boss was the non-linear numbering house scheme
| though. Some friends and I once spent a fruitless hour
| searching for the HR Giger bar in Tokyo, which we knew was at
| X-Y-Z, but only managed to find X-Y-(Z+1) and X-Y-(Z-1).
| donatj wrote:
| When I was in Japan in 2008, I found if I asked someone how to
| get somewhere they would often just walk you there, even if it
| was several blocks.
| tforcram wrote:
| I remember living in Japan around 2001 and having to handle
| random addresses.
|
| We had several atlas books of regions and neighborhoods. Looking
| up an address was an exercise in getting the right book for the
| neighborhood, then using an index which noted which block of the
| map that house number was in (eg 'c10' using a grid with numbers
| across the top and letters down the side).
|
| Plotting a course from where you were to this location was also
| exciting and required patching together multiple maps.
|
| Actually following that course in real life was another challenge
| altogether and really required visualizing what you saw on the
| map since, as noted, there aren't many street names.
|
| I'm honestly surprised we were able to succeed at getting to
| places as often as we did.
|
| I kind of miss that experience, just plugging an address into a
| phone and following directions is much less exciting.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| The piecing together of multiple maps doesn't sound much
| different from the days when we relied upon "The Thomas Guide
| to Los Angeles & Orange Counties":
| https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-8541cb8ec83526640938d...
|
| > _just plugging an address into a phone and following
| directions is much less exciting._
|
| Something I realised a year or two back: my mental model of
| breaking down a larger goal into smaller subgoals is
| navigation. If you want to get from somewhere in Los Angeles to
| somewhere in San Francisco, and that step needs to be broken
| down, it can be analysed into (a) get from LA to Harris Ranch,
| then (b) get from Harris Ranch to SF.
|
| Obviously people growing up now don't think of things that way
| any more, because you don't have to be able to think of the
| equivalent of Harris Ranch on demand; what do you all use
| instead as a mental model?
| gedy wrote:
| First job was a delivery driver pre-Internet and Thomas guide
| was a lifesaver. It's hard to explain to younger people my
| pride in that I was "good" at finding multiple addresses and
| plotting best course between locations, then knowing where
| phone booths were to call in on the road, etc. Definitely
| makes me appreciate GPS and mobile mapping apps.
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| This is cool, because it means that naming matches a sense of
| closeness. Someone living on the same street can live quite far
| away from me, but someone living in the same block is close.
| Christopher Alexander wrote about the advantage of small named
| units. You could organize a party for a block, but not for a
| street.
| mortenjorck wrote:
| The funny thing with the Chicago example is that Chicago actually
| does have a legacy system for addressing blocks! The examples
| from River North wouldn't be included (it dates from 1830 and
| only covers the original 58 blocks centered around the Y of the
| Chicago River), but you can see the historical map here:
| http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/11175.html
|
| The only popular use of this system in living memory has been the
| long-in-development Block 37 project in the Loop that finally
| opened in 2016, about seven years after this post.
| pimlottc wrote:
| Huh, I never really thought about where the name "Block 37"
| came from, that's pretty interesting!
| awad wrote:
| South Korea was like this too but they thankfully switched
| recently. It's not uncommon to receive addresses in both the old
| and new style since most locals grew up on the former.
| tuan wrote:
| this reminds me of issue I had when I heard American on TV or
| movies use number of blocks to describe a distance, for example:
| "my house is three blocks away from here". I thought block is a
| unit, just like meter or kilometer. I've wondered for a long time
| how many meters in a block there are. Just for comparison, in
| Vietnam, we say something like "my house is about 100m away from
| here" or something like that. If you look at the map of city like
| Hanoi, Vietnam, you'll see why we cannot use "blocks" to describe
| distance.
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