I mentioned before that getting to an specific address in Japan is tricky. Here are two reasons for this: except for the really major streets, the rest have no names; and buildings are numbered in the order they were built. (I’m not 100% sure on this but I’ve heard this so many times that it seems true.)
So, let’s say it was back-in-the-day and you built a house on one end of a new street. You could claim house number 1. Let’s say after a couple of years 17 other people claimed addresses on your street, then you built a shop next to your house. The shop address would be 19, the next number available.
It really makes you think about how US addresses are numbered. In most of the US, every street is divided into plots or sections and those have been assigned numbers before anything is built on it. When you build a house, you already know what the address is going to be. You also know how far you are from the boundary line. The first block counting from the boundary line has addresses from 1 – 99 and even if nobody uses all 100 spots, the very next block addresses start with 100, the block after that starts with 200. On top of that, we put all the even-numbered addresses on one side and the odd-numbered addresses on the other.
This makes pretty much every city in the USA some kind of system. If you said you wanted to go to 506 Winter Street, Big Town, PA (I made that up) you know a lot: the state, the town, the street, the block, which side of the block and the house number.
I wish somebody would take control of the addressing system in Japan.
To get home from a party that Eric’s friends threw for me (which was fun!) I had to give the taxi driver a card that my hostel had given me with the hostel’s address. As an experienced driver, this gave him a general idea of what part of town to drive to but he still had to call the dispatcher to locate it properly. Instead of looking for a sign with a building number he was looking for the name of the hostel. No numbers.
I forgot to get the card back from him, so I need to stop at the front desk today and get another one.
BTW (that’s “by the way”) the taxis are SO CLEAN it’s amazing. (Well, Japan is pretty amazingly clean everywhere). Every taxi has seats that are covered with sparkling white lacy cloth. Not: used-to-be-white-but-now-something’s-spilled-on-it, they are actually: just-came-out-of-the-laundry white. I wonder if drivers take them off every night and get them cleaned?
Questions:
What does your house address say about where you are located? What number, side, street, town, and country is your address?
Do you know how to address a letter to yourself? In what order do you put the information? (Bonus: In Japan they put the prefecture first….what is a prefecture?)
What are some places in your life that are very clean or sanitary? Tell why cleanliness matters in those places.
