Quote:
Originally Posted by SFUVancouver
I read once that in post-war Tokyo all the buildings were numbered in the order in which they were approved and many do not adhere to any sort of logical grid. Does anyone know if this is still the case? How on earth does anyone know where they are going if the buildings are not numbered sequentially?
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It was done from memory and it's almost perfect by a rather famous English autistic artistic genius.
Video on YouTube
As for Tokyo (and any other city as far as I know) being sequentially numbered, in actual fact there are few street names in Tokyo. Directions are given from Landmarks. For example: "Take the west exit from Tennoji station, go straight for 200m to the Makudo (Mcd's) turn left and go straight for 400m until you get to a little sculpture, turn right into the complex and we're in Block 4, Building 3, 'Your name here' "
Of course, if you go to Japan, you'll notice that every japanese home has a fax machine... in fact, the Japanese were huge adopters of the fax machine... why? So they could fax each other directions to each others' houses. Of course, nowadays everyone has a GPS on their phones and cars, so they usually use that... but it's true, if you don't have accurate directions, you could get easily lost.
A typical Japanese Address (written in English for the sake of explanation):
T170-3293 (postal code)
Tokyo Chuo-ku Ginza (Prefecture, Town/Ward/city, Sub-area)
5-2-1 (Sub-area 5, block 2, building 1)
Morimoto, Yoshi-san (Lastname, First Name, Mr/Ms)
When written in Japanese, it makes sense from a flow point of view, least specific to most specific (except the postal code, by itself)
Someone who lives in Burnaby would be like this:
V1X XV1
Metro Vancouver, Burnaby, Metrotown
Area 5, Block 2, Building 1
Smith John, Mr.
Kind of cool, if you ask me... but I'm all for things written down logically... (like dates, 2007-12-14 (yyyy-mm-dd) makes so much more logical sense than a short date format of mm/dd/yy )
my $0.02