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Forms of Address -- or --"Help! Where's Aunt Setsuko's house?"

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Most Japanese, given only the address of a home or business, will have a hard time finding it. And if you ask a local person for help with finding a given address, you're likely to get a reply like, "Well, it could be up that way..."

This doesn't mean that Japanese are lacking mentally, but rather that it takes an uncommon mind--say, that of Einstein--to make heads or tails of the Japanese address system.

Finding a house or building you have never been to in the U.S. is, for the most part, a relatively easy thing. You might need a map to locate the street, but once you're there you can generally rely on sequential numbering of houses, with odd numbers on one side of the street and evens on the other.

By contrast, a map is pretty much a necessity for finding a Japanese location. Businesses routinely provide maps to their shops in their advertising, including landmarks, street names (which aren't included in address--and anyway, only major streets have names), and whatever else they can think of to help you navigate to their door.

The Japanese address system works as follows:

A city or ward is divided into "machi", or "towns". These towns have names like (taking Minato Ward, Tokyo, as an example) Roppongi, Akasaka, Nishi-Azabu, and Toranomon.

Each town is divided into "chome" (CHOU-meh), which could be called "neighborhoods". Each neighborhood has a number. WIthin each neighborhood, each "banchi"--block--is also numbered.

I have a Tokyo map book which is always a great help in finding addresses--down to the numbered block. (Signs on utility poles giving machi, chome, and banchi are also helpful--when you can find them.) After that, though, even the map is of little use.

Each building or house on a block is numbered. But in many cases the number does not appear on the building. And figuring out the numbers of unlabeled buildings is not at all a foolproof process. On a number of occasions, when the person I was going to see didn't give me an idea of how to recognize their building, I circumnavigated the block a few times, fruitlessly, and finally had to ask a passerby or call the person to come find me.

Each city or ward office has a bureau that oversees address issues, the Jushogakari. A Fussa City, Tokyo, Jushogakari spokesman, when asked, wasn't able to recite any iron-clad policy for numbering houses. "Each plot of land has a number, " he said. "But sometimes plots merge or split, and then we have to decide what the building numbers there will be."

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