How Japanese Addresses Work: Chome, Banchi and Go Explained

Last reviewed 10 Sep 2026 · 14 min read

If you have stared at a Japanese address and could not find a single street name in it, you are not missing something. There is not one there. Japan does not organize most of its addresses around roads at all. It organizes them around blocks of land, numbered in the order they were registered, inside a district that itself has a name and a number.

That is the whole trick, and once you see it, a Japanese address stops looking like a code and starts looking like a filing system. This post walks through how the chome-banchi-go structure actually works, why streets were left out of it, what changes when you are a foreign resident with a residence card, and what to do when a delivery driver calls you from outside your building because your address, on paper, does not tell them where the front door is.

This is written for people living in Japan or about to move here, not for travelers. If you are trying to find a hotel, a map app will get you there faster than reading this. If you are trying to understand the address on your own lease, your residence card, or a parcel you are expecting, keep going.

Two competing English-language pages already cover parts of this ground, one of them holding rankings on well over 300 separate keyword variations of "how to read a Japanese address," which tells you the long tail here runs deep: people are not just searching the head term, they are searching specific fragments of it, like what a single digit means or how to say an address out loud. That depth is exactly why a shallow explainer does not hold up. This post goes further than a phrase-by-phrase glossary: it covers the legal basis for the system, what changes for a residence card holder, where the system genuinely breaks down even for Japanese residents, and what to actually do the first time a delivery driver cannot find your door.

System	Block-based (街区方式), not street-based
Structure	Prefecture > city/ward > town/district > chome > banchi > go
Postal code format	7 digits, written 123-4567
Street names	Almost never used in the address itself (Kyoto and parts of Sapporo are the exceptions)
Governing law	Act on Indication of Residence (住居表示に関する法律), 1962
Best for	Anyone signing a lease, registering with a ward office, or receiving mail or deliveries in Japan
Not needed for	Finding your way somewhere on foot. Use a map, not the address, for that.

Quick Answer

A Japanese address reads from largest area to smallest: prefecture, city or special ward, a named town or district, then three numbers separated by hyphens, for example 2-3-5. The first number is the chome (丁目), a numbered sub-district usually a few blocks wide. The second is the banchi (番地), the specific block inside that chome. The third is the go (号), the specific building or unit on that block. There is no street name anywhere in that sequence, because the block itself, not the road running past it, is the unit the whole system is built on.

The confusing part for most foreign residents is not the numbers, it is the absence of anything to walk toward. You cannot follow "2-3-5" the way you would follow "24 Baker Street," because block 3 is not necessarily next to block 2 or block 4. Blocks are usually numbered in the order they were built or registered, not in a straight line, so the honest advice is: use the address to write it down correctly, and use a map app or a landmark to actually get there.

Reading a Japanese Address, Step by Step

Before going deeper into any single part, it helps to see the whole sequence laid out as one pass, left to right, in the order a Japanese form expects it:

1. Postal code. Seven digits, written 123-4567, placed at the very top.
2. Prefecture (都道府県). Tokyo, Osaka, Kanagawa, and so on. Tokyo is technically a "to" (都) rather than a "ken" (県), but it functions the same way in an address.
3. City, ward or municipality (市区町村). One of Tokyo's 23 special wards, or a city elsewhere in the country.
4. Town or named district (町名). A recognizable neighborhood name, closer in spirit to a suburb name than a street name.
5. Chome (丁目). The first of the three numbers. A numbered sub-area inside the town.
6. Banchi (番地). The second number. The specific block.
7. Go (号). The third number. The specific building on that block.
8. Building name and room number, if the address is an apartment, mansion or office building rather than a detached house.

Every Japanese address you will ever encounter, from a lease to a parcel slip to your own residence card, follows this same order. Once the eight-step shape is familiar, the only thing that changes address to address is which specific words and numbers fill each slot.

How the Chome-Banchi-Go System Actually Works

Take a real address format and break it apart. Minato City government uses this example for a detached house or a commercial building in Shibakoen: 港区芝公園一丁目5番25号, which in English order is Minato City, Shibakoen 1-chome, 5-ban, 25-go, or written with hyphens, Shibakoen 1-5-25. Here is what each part is doing, according to Minato City's own explainer on the system:

• Prefecture and city or ward. Tokyo (東京都), then one of the 23 special wards or a city. This part behaves like anywhere else.
• Town or district name (町 or 丁目 base name). Shibakoen, in this example. This is closer to a neighborhood name than a street name. It groups a real, walkable area of the city under one label.
• Chome (丁目). The "1" in "1-chome." A chome is a numbered sub-district inside the town, usually assigned either radiating outward from a fixed point such as the Imperial Palace, or in a ring pattern from the center of the district outward. Chome numbers are written with kanji numerals in the formal address (一丁目, 二丁目, and so on) even though everything after it uses arabic numerals.
• Banchi, shown as ban (番). The "5" in the example. This is the block itself, called a gaiku (街区), meaning the patch of land generally bounded by roads, a river, or a rail line on all sides. Blocks are numbered in what is officially called a "zigzag" pattern (千鳥式), starting near a fixed reference point and snaking through the district rather than running in a straight line.
• Go (号). The "25" in the example. This is the specific building's position along that block's edge, assigned in sequence as you walk the perimeter. In an apartment building, the go is usually followed by a room number, written as something like 5-25-301.

This method is called the block system, or gaiku hoshiki (街区方式), and it is used almost everywhere in Japan. Japan's Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, which administers the system nationally, describes its purpose plainly: replace the old, confusing land-parcel numbering (地番, chiban) that municipalities were using for everyday addresses, with a more orderly system built around street blocks and building numbers, under the Act on Indication of Residence (住居表示に関する法律), passed 10 May 1962. Japanese-language pages on this topic note plainly that these government pages are published in Japanese only.

A worked example, start to finish

Say you are told your new apartment's address is:

〒106-0032 東京都港区六本木3-2-1 六本木ヒルズレジデンスB 501号室

Reading it in order:

1. 〒106-0032 – the postal code. Always seven digits, written with a hyphen after the third digit.
2. 東京都 – Tokyo Metropolis (the prefecture-level unit for Tokyo).
3. 港区 – Minato City, one of Tokyo's 23 special wards.
4. 六本木 – Roppongi, the named district.
5. 3-2-1 – chome 3, banchi 2, go 1.
6. 六本木ヒルズレジデンスB – the building name, Roppongi Hills Residence B.
7. 501号室 – room 501.

In English order for a courier or a form, this becomes: Roppongi Hills Residence B, Room 501, 3-2-1 Roppongi, Minato-ku, Tokyo 106-0032. Japanese convention writes largest-to-smallest; English-language forms usually flip it to smallest-to-largest, building first and country or prefecture last. Both describe the same physical location. Neither one requires a street name, because there was never one to begin with.

Why There Are No Street Names

This is the part that trips up almost every new resident, so it is worth answering directly: most of Japan genuinely does not name its streets, and the address format is not a workaround for that, it is the reason for it. The 1962 law that created the modern block system was explicitly a replacement for an even older land-registry numbering method, not an adaptation of a street-naming tradition that got lost. Japan built its addressing around parcels and blocks from the start, in the cities where the "juukyo hyouji" (住居表示) system has been rolled out.

Two named exceptions prove the rule: Kyoto, where a grid of imperial-era streets does carry names and addresses are commonly given relative to a nearby intersection, and parts of Sapporo and a handful of Hokkaido cities, which were laid out on a numbered grid in the Meiji era with a similar street-relative logic. Everywhere else, including the whole of Tokyo's 23 wards, the block is the unit and the road is just the thing that happens to run along its edge.

There is a real practical consequence to this, and it is one that Japanese residents themselves complain about as much as foreign ones do. Blocks are not always numbered in a walkable sequence. A building's go number reflects the order it was registered or built, not its position relative to its neighbors, and older, un-modernized parts of a city can sit in what surveyors in Japan literally call a "map confusion zone" (地図混乱地域), where the registered paper boundaries no longer match the buildings on the ground. Ask any Japan Post letter carrier how they actually find an address on their route on day one and the honest answer, visible across Japanese online forums, is that they do not read the address like a map. They memorize the route, building by building, over their first weeks on the job, the same way a new resident eventually memorizes their own block without thinking about the chome number again.

What Japanese Sources Say That English Guides Usually Don't

Most English-language articles on this topic frame the chome-banchi-go system as a foreigner's problem: confusing for outsiders, second nature to locals. Reading it from the Japanese side first tells a different story. Japanese-language discussion threads on this exact topic, including a mail carrier's own account of the job on the blogging platform note.com, describe new postal workers spending their first several weeks on a route memorizing which building sits where, building by building, rather than reading the address the way an outsider assumes they do. One thread of questions on Yahoo!知恵袋 about how postal workers "know" an address is answered, repeatedly, with a version of "they don't read it like a map, they learn the route." Surveying firms and land registries use a specific term, "map confusion zone" (地図混乱地域), for places where the official numbering has drifted far enough from the physical layout that even professionals need local knowledge to reconcile the two.

In other words, the friction foreign residents feel when they first meet a Japanese address is not really a language or culture gap. It is the same friction Japanese people encounter in an unfamiliar part of their own city, and they solve it the same way you eventually will: with a map app, a phone call, or a landmark, not by getting faster at reading the numbers. That reframe matters practically. It means you are not doing something wrong when you cannot find a building from the address alone, and it means the fastest way to get comfortable with this system is not to study the numbering logic harder, but to do what everyone here already does: treat the written address as the thing you register and receive mail under, and treat a map app as the thing that actually gets you to the door.

How the Postal Code Fits In

The postal code (郵便番号) is a separate system from the block address, run by Japan Post, and it does real work that a Western zip code does not always do. Japan Post's own postal code manual sets out the rule directly: the code is always seven digits, formatted as three digits, a hyphen, then four digits (123-4567), and it maps to a town-level area (町域), not to an individual house or block. In dense areas, a single very tall building can get its own postal code, with the sixth and seventh digits used to indicate a specific floor.

The postal code buys you something concrete: if you write it correctly, you can skip the prefecture and city name entirely and Japan Post's sorting system will still route the item correctly on the postal code alone. What you cannot skip, even with a perfect postal code, is everything from the town name down. Japan Post is explicit that the town name, chome, banchi and go must always be written out in full; the postal code shortens the top of the address, never the bottom.

If you are still working out how Japan's postal network operates day to day, from where to buy stamps to how registered mail and cash-on-delivery work, our guide to Japan Post and the post office is a practical starting point.

Registering an Address as a Foreign Resident

This is where a Japanese address stops being an abstract puzzle and becomes something with a deadline attached. If you are a mid-to-long-term resident on a residence card (在留カード), Japanese law requires you to register your address with the ward or city office covering the place you actually live, within 14 days of moving in, under Japan's Immigration Services Agency rules. This applies the first time you set up a residence in Japan and every time you move afterward.

The mechanics are simple but unforgiving on timing:

1. Take your residence card to the counter of your new ward or city office, not to an immigration bureau. Immigration offices do not process this filing.
2. Submit a short residence notification form (住居地届出書). No fee is charged.
3. The counter staff write the new address directly onto the back of your physical residence card and update the same information on the card's embedded IC chip.
4. If you already file a standard moving-in notification (転入届) with the same office under Japan's resident registration law, that filing alone satisfies the immigration reporting requirement too. You do not need to submit both forms separately.

We cover the step-by-step version of this filing, including what happens if you miss the 14-day window, in a separate guide to registering or changing your address in Japan. That post is the one to read before your move-in day. This one is about understanding the address itself: what the numbers mean, and how to write, say and hand it over correctly once you have it.

Address registration is one line item on a longer list. Our guide to what to fix in your first 90 days in Japan covers the rest of the paperwork sequence, from the ward office to your bank and insurance, in the order that actually saves you money and time.

One detail worth flagging honestly: your residence card's address field is not decorative. Ward offices, banks, and mobile phone providers routinely check that the address on your card matches the address you give them, and a card with an out-of-date back panel is one of the more common reasons a foreign resident gets turned away mid-application for something unrelated to housing at all, from opening a bank account to picking up a parcel held at a post office under ID verification.

Giving Your Address to a Delivery Driver

A Japanese courier, whether from Japan Post, Yamato, Sagawa, or a food delivery platform, will usually navigate to your block using GPS and a delivery app rather than reading your written address the way you would read a Western one. That said, three habits genuinely make you easier to find and reduce misdeliveries:

• Put a nameplate on your door or mailbox. Japanese apartment buildings are dense, and units without a name on the door or postbox are the single most common reason for a missed delivery, according to Japanese-language courier discussion threads. It does not need to be your full legal name; a surname is enough.
• Give the building name, not just the numbers. "3-2-1 Roppongi, Minato-ku" identifies a block. "Roppongi Hills Residence B, 3-2-1 Roppongi, Minato-ku, Room 501" identifies a specific door. Skip the building name and a first-time driver has to guess which of several structures on that block is yours.
• Add a landmark for anyone unfamiliar with the block. "Across from the Family Mart" or "the building with the blue awning" is not a formal part of the address, but it is exactly how Japanese residents describe their own homes to a first-time visitor, precisely because the written address does not encode walking directions.

If a driver calls you from outside because they cannot find the entrance, that is not a sign you got your own address wrong. It usually means the block's go numbering runs in an order that is not intuitive from the street, which, as covered above, is a known and common feature of the system rather than a mistake on your part.

For the wider picture on how parcels move through Japan, including what to do when a courier cannot reach you and how redelivery requests work, our guide to parcel and courier services in Japan covers the process end to end.

A Glossary of Japanese Address Terms

Gloss these once and the rest of this post, and every lease or form you sign in Japan, gets easier to read on sight.

Term	Reading	What it means
住所	jusho	Address, the general word
丁目	chome	Numbered sub-district inside a named town
番地 / 番	banchi / ban	The specific block (gaiku) within a chome
号	go	The specific building's position on a block
郵便番号	yubin bangou	Postal code, always seven digits
地番	chiban	Land-registry parcel number, used for property records rather than mail
街区	gaiku	A city block, generally bounded by roads, a river or a rail line
町域	choiki	The town-level area a single postal code maps to
住居表示	jukyo hyoji	The block-based address display system itself, and the law behind it
在留カード	zairyu kado	Residence card, carried by mid-to-long-term foreign residents
転入届	tennyu todoke	Moving-in notification filed at the ward or city office

What Foreign Residents Get Wrong Most Often

A few patterns show up repeatedly among new arrivals, based on both the structure of the system itself and the practical complaints that surface in expat community discussion:

• Assuming the numbers run in sequence like house numbers on a Western street. They usually do not. Banchi 5 is not necessarily next to banchi 4 and banchi 6.
• Dropping the building name to save space on a form. In an apartment building, the building name plus room number is often the only thing that distinguishes your unit from a dozen others sharing the same chome-banchi-go.
• Writing the postal code without the hyphen, or in the wrong position. Japan Post's format is fixed: three digits, hyphen, four digits, placed before the prefecture on Japanese forms and typically after the city and postal code on English-language ones.
• Forgetting that the residence card update is separate from a bank or phone company address change. Updating your card at the ward office does not automatically update your bank, your phone carrier, or your employer's records. Each of those has to be told separately.
• Treating the chome name as a street name and trying to "walk down" it. A chome is an area, not a road. It can be several blocks wide in every direction.
• Assuming a company or employer's business card address follows the same detail level as a residential one. Company addresses often stop at the go number and building name and drop the room number, because a receptionist or building directory handles the rest; use the full room number anyway when you are the one sending something there, since not every courier defaults to checking a directory.
• Mixing up "-ku" and "-shi" when writing a ward versus a city. Tokyo's 23 special wards all end in 区 (ku) and function differently in Japan's local government structure than a regular city (市, shi) elsewhere in the country, even though both look the same slot in an address and neither changes how you fill in the chome-banchi-go that follows it.

Every one of these is a formatting mistake rather than a legal one. None of them will get your residence card rejected outright, but each one adds a delay somewhere: a form bounced back for clarification, a delivery re-attempted a day later, or a bank teller asking you to rewrite an address by hand at the counter. Getting the format right the first time is a small effort that removes a surprisingly large share of the friction new residents report in their first few months.

Special Cases: New Builds, Redevelopment and Building Names

A few situations come up often enough for foreign residents in Tokyo that they are worth covering on their own.

New construction. When you build or substantially renovate a structure inside a district where the block system is already in force, you have to separately apply to the ward office for your building's official address, a process distinct from your building permit. Minato City's own guidance is explicit that a construction permit under building standards law and an address application are two different filings, and a brand-new building has no valid postal address until the second one is complete. If you are moving into a newly built apartment, do not be surprised if the building shows an address online weeks before it appears correctly in every delivery company's system, because each courier network updates its own internal maps on its own schedule after a new registration goes live.

Redevelopment and block renumbering. Large redevelopment projects sometimes trigger an official renumbering of a district's blocks, called a gaiku henko (街区変更). Minato City, for example, publishes standing public notices whenever this happens in one of its neighborhoods. If you live in an area undergoing major redevelopment, an address that was correct when you signed your lease can technically change during a long tenancy, though this is uncommon and always announced publicly by the ward in advance.

Building names carry real weight. Because banchi and go numbers only get you to a block and a rough position on it, the building name is doing more work in Japan than it does in most Western addressing systems. A mansion (the Japanese term for a mid-rise or high-rise apartment building, unrelated to the English word "mansion") or an apato with a distinctive, clearly displayed name is measurably easier for a first-time visitor or driver to find than a building known only by its go number. This is also why so many Tokyo apartment buildings carry elaborate, sometimes almost aspirational names: the name is functioning as wayfinding, not just branding.

Pros and Cons of the Japanese Address System

The system has real advantages once you know how to use it, and real friction that no amount of familiarity fully removes.

What works well:

• Postal sorting is fast and reliable, because a correct postal code alone is enough to route mail to the right town-level area.
• The system is stable over time. A block's banchi number rarely changes even when a building is torn down and rebuilt, unlike a street address that depends on which side of a renumbered road you sit on.
• It scales cleanly to very dense, very vertical cities. A single high-rise can carry its own postal code and internal go numbering without inventing new streets to describe it.
• It is genuinely simple to write correctly once you understand the four parts, because there is no ambiguity about what each number represents.

What does not work well:

• It gives you almost no intuitive sense of direction or distance. Two addresses in the same chome can be a five-minute walk apart or a twenty-minute walk apart, and the numbers alone will not tell you which.
• First-time visitors, delivery drivers, and even long-term Japanese residents in an unfamiliar part of their own city routinely need a map app or a phone call to find a specific address.
• Older or redeveloped districts can fall into the "map confusion zones" mentioned earlier, where official numbering and physical reality have drifted apart.
• Multi-tenant buildings without a visible name plate or room number are genuinely hard to navigate to on the first attempt, regardless of how well the visitor understands the underlying system.

Who This Guide Is Not For

If you need directions to get somewhere today, close this tab and open a map app instead. Nothing here will get you from a train station to a restaurant faster than GPS will. This guide is aimed at people who need to read, write, or register an address correctly, not people who need to walk to one.

It is also not the guide for the mechanics of registering your address at the ward office. That process, the forms, the 14-day deadline, what happens if you are late, and what a My Number notification has to do with it, is covered fully in our guide to registering or changing your address in Japan, linked earlier in this post. Read this post to understand what the address means; read that one to understand what to do with it at the counter.

Japan's Address System vs a Street-and-Number System

For anyone used to a Western address, the comparison that actually clarifies things is not "Japan vs the United States," it is block-based vs street-based addressing as two different design choices, each optimized for something different.

	Japan (block system)	Typical Western system (street system)
Core unit	The block (gaiku)	The street
Numbering logic	Order of registration or construction	Sequential along the street, often odd/even by side
Street names required	No, in most of the country	Yes, essentially always
Finding an address on foot	Requires a map or local knowledge	Often possible by walking the street and reading numbers
Stability over redevelopment	High; block numbers rarely change	Lower; renumbering happens when streets are extended or renamed
Best suited to	Dense, vertically built cities with irregular street patterns	Cities with a laid-out street grid

Two other systems are worth a quick mention because they get compared to Japan's often, and the comparison is not quite right in either direction. South Korea used a very similar land-parcel-based address system for decades, but has been phasing in a Western-style road-name system (도로명주소) nationally since 2014, specifically because its own postal and delivery services found parcel-based addressing hard to navigate. The United Kingdom's postcode system looks superficially similar to Japan's postal code because both can pin down a very small area, but the underlying address it modifies is still a conventional street-and-house-number address, not a block-based one. Japan's block system is closer in spirit to a land registry turned into a mailing address than it is to either of these.

Practical Advice from E-Housing

When we sign a foreign resident up for a lease, the single most common confusion is not the chome-banchi-go structure itself, it is realizing partway through move-in paperwork that three separate things all need the same address and none of them update each other automatically: the residence card at the ward office, the bank or phone company on file, and the name on the actual mailbox. Get all three matching in the same week you move in, and most of the friction in this post disappears before it starts.

A few habits we recommend to every client, not just first-time residents:

• Write your building name in full on every form, even ones that only ask for chome-banchi-go. Leaving it off is the single most common cause of a missed delivery on a new lease.
• Put a nameplate up on day one. It costs nothing and it is the fastest fix on this list.
• Screenshot or photograph your residence card's back panel after every ward office visit, so you have a record of exactly what is on file if a bank or provider later disputes it.
• If your building sits in an older or recently redeveloped block, do not assume a delivery driver will find it on the first attempt. Save your address as a saved location in a map app and be ready to send a pin link, not just the text address, for your first few deliveries.

At E-Housing, we work with foreigners, expat families, international students and working professionals moving into homes across greater Tokyo every day, and address confusion is one of the most fixable parts of a move if it is handled in the first week rather than the third month. If you are searching for a place to live and want a team that already knows which ward offices are fast, which buildings have confusing numbering, and how to get your paperwork lined up correctly from day one, that is exactly the kind of groundwork we do for our clients before they ever pick up a key.

FAQ: Japanese Addresses Explained

What does "chome" mean in a Japanese address?

Chome (丁目) is a numbered sub-district inside a named town or area, typically covering several blocks. It is the first of the three numbers in a standard address, such as the "1" in 1-5-25.

What is the difference between banchi and go?

Banchi (番地, often shown simply as "番") identifies the specific block of land, called a gaiku. Go (号) identifies the specific building's position along the edge of that block. Together with the chome, they form the three-part number that pinpoints an address, such as 1-5-25.

Why don't Japanese addresses have street names?

Most Japanese cities never built their addressing around named streets. The system that replaced the older land-parcel numbering in 1962 organized addresses around numbered blocks instead, under the Act on Indication of Residence. Kyoto and parts of Sapporo are the main exceptions, where streets are named and used in everyday addresses.

How do I write a Japanese postal code correctly?

Japan Post's format is always seven digits split three and four, written with a hyphen: 123-4567. If the postal code is correct, you can omit the prefecture and city name and mail will still be sorted correctly, but the town name, chome, banchi and go must always be included in full.

Is the order of a Japanese address different in English?

Yes. Japanese writes an address from largest to smallest: prefecture, city or ward, town, chome-banchi-go, building, room. English-language forms usually reverse this, starting with the room and building and ending with the prefecture and postal code, but both describe the exact same location.

How do I read my residence card's address field?

Your residence card's back panel shows your officially registered address, updated by hand at the ward office counter each time you register or change your residence, with the same information stored on the card's embedded IC chip. If you have moved and the card still shows your old address, that filing has not been completed yet.

How long do I have to register my address after moving to Japan?

Fourteen days from the date you move into your new residence, under Immigration Services Agency rules for residence card holders. The same 14-day window applies every time you move afterward, not just on your first arrival.

Where do I register my address, the ward office or immigration?

The ward or city office covering your new address, not an immigration bureau. Bring your residence card and the standard moving-in notification form used for resident registration; in most cases this single filing satisfies both the municipal and immigration reporting requirements at once.

Can a building have more than one valid address?

Not officially, but a single very tall building can be assigned its own dedicated postal code with the final two digits indicating a floor, which sometimes leads residents to see slightly different-looking postal codes for the same street address depending on which floor they live on.

Why did the delivery driver call me even though I gave the correct address?

Because the written address identifies a block, not a walking route to your door. Go numbering runs in the order buildings were registered or built rather than in a straight line along the block's edge, so a first-time driver on an unfamiliar block often needs a phone call or a landmark to find the entrance.

What is a "chiban" and how is it different from my address?

Chiban (地番) is a land-registry parcel number, used for property registration, land ownership records, and property tax, not for everyday mail or navigation. It predates the modern block-based mailing address and the two numbering systems do not always match, which is one reason land registry offices and ward offices sometimes give different answers about the same plot of land.

Do I need to include the building name on official Japanese forms?

Yes, whenever you live in an apartment or shared building. Chome-banchi-go alone often describes a block with several buildings on it; the building name plus room number is what actually distinguishes your unit from your neighbors'.

Is Kyoto's address system really different from the rest of Japan?

Yes. Kyoto is one of the few Japanese cities where streets are commonly named and used in everyday addresses, alongside a chome-banchi-go style number, a holdover from its imperial-era grid layout. It is the clearest exception to the block-based rule that governs most of the country.

How is the Japanese system different from South Korea's addresses?

Historically the two were similar, both organized around land parcels rather than streets. South Korea has been transitioning nationally to a Western-style road-name address system since 2014, specifically to make its own postal and delivery services easier to navigate. Japan has not made an equivalent nationwide change.

What should I put on a package if I am shipping something to a Japanese address from abroad?

Write the full address in the smallest-to-largest English order: name, building name and room number, chome-banchi-go, town or district, city or ward, prefecture, postal code, and "Japan" as the country. Do not translate the town or chome name into English wording; keep it in its Japanese-language form (romanized) so it matches what is on file with Japan Post and your building.

Can I look up someone else's address just from their name?

No. Japan does not have a public reverse-address lookup by name, and asking a ward office to disclose someone else's registered address will be refused without a specific legal basis. Address information tied to a residence card or resident registration is treated as personal data.

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This guide reflects the Act on Indication of Residence and Immigration Services Agency procedures current as of September 2026. Rules on residence card registration and ward office procedures can change; confirm current requirements with your local ward office before relying on any deadline in this post.