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Street Names

There aren't any.

Well, that's not 100% true, but it's better to say that, to get the point across. Only a few really big streets have names, but this is only for local reference. The most common street name emanating from the central station in many towns is "Oo-dori" which literally means "big street" or "main street." Street names do not exist in addresses. The Japanese addressing system is based on a quadrant system, roughly meaning "blocks" of a neighborhood, not on streets with linear, numeric addresses. In other words, there is no "123 Ginza Dori" designating a specific building on Ginza Dori with the number 123, which would be "up" from 120 and "down" from 129 Ginza Dori.

However, you can find neighborhoods named after a major streets. In these cases, however, it doesn't alter the structure of the addresses - they are still based on the chome-ban-chi system. Foreigners, however, may run across these famous streets and assume it is a street number system and be confused.

Usually, a neighborhood name will probably end in either -cho or -machi. The kanji, however, is the same. The character has two pronunciations (but which one to use is fixed.

In the countryside, the numbering system changes, since there aren't the "quadrant" blocks of the cities. Often an address will end with "mura", which means village. There will frequently be another location name used, usually designating the village section. There will be just one number attached, such as

345 Nakamachi, Naka-cho

There are other variations, but for the casual visitor, with little understanding of Japanese, a treatise on the variations and implications of Japanese addresses would serve to confuse rather than illuminate.

 
Japan Info
Japan Info
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