Horse 408 - Where the Streets Have No Name

If you drive around various parts of Sydney you'll find that whole sections of suburbs have been named with respect to a common theme. In a lot of cases it's because they were part of a common estate release, on other occasions it is done to reflect some sort of sentiment.

I live on Lavinia St. The surrounding streets are Isabelle, Suzanna, Athabaska, Cornelia... notice a trend here? When the block was released back in 1953, it had formed part of the Spanish Estates. Thus all the connection with Spanish queens.
Not too far away are Limpopo, Zambesi, Mississippi, Orinoco, Amazon etc. This block was the Grand Rivers housing commission estate. Likewise there are common themes like this all over Sydney and dare I say possibly the world.

Except for Japan.

With the exception of major roads, Japanese streets are not named. Instead, cities and towns are subdivided into areas, subareas and blocks, similar to the insulae system of the Roman empire. To complicate the matter, houses within each subarea were formerly not numbered in geographical sequence but in the temporal order in which they were constructed.

If addresses are written in Japanese, they start with the postal code, followed by the prefecture, city and subarea(s), and end with the recipient's name. If addresses are written in English, they start with the recipient's name and end with the prefecture and postal code. A typical Japanese address looks as follows:

Mr Hiro Katsushima
8-19-3 Ginza, Chou-Ku
Tokyo 170-3293

that is:

Mr Hiro Katsushima (if you do happen to live here whoever you are, then that's plain bizarre)
Section 8, Block 19, Building 3
Tokyo (the Ward or Prefecture), Postcode (all postcodes are seven digits long)

Most Japanese people will give you a map to tell you where they live with handy little pictures and things to look out for. This system was in place well before the US Army occupied Japan after WW2 and was voted to remain in place to confuse them.

U2 had a song called Where the Streets Have No Name. I bet Bono wasn't thinking of Japan when he wrote that.