In Japan, most streets have no name — and house numbers aren't in order

Ask for directions in Tokyo and you may be told to head to a block, not a street. In most of Japan, streets are unnamed — they're just the gaps between blocks. Addresses instead zoom inward through named areas: a city, a district (chōme), a block (banchi), and finally a building number (gō). The street itself is almost irrelevant to finding a place.

Stranger still, building numbers were traditionally assigned in order of construction, not by position. So the oldest house on a block might be #1, while its next-door neighbor — built decades later — could be #14. Walking down a block, the numbers can jump around seemingly at random, which is why even locals and delivery drivers lean on landmarks, maps, and now smartphone GPS.

This flips the Western logic, where a named street is the backbone and numbers climb steadily along it. Japan's system reflects a worldview organized around areas and blocks rather than lines. A few places, like parts of Kyoto and Sapporo, use grid-style named streets — but for most of the country, if you don't have the chōme-banchi-gō, you're wandering.