One of the most surprising, and confronting, aspects for foreigners visiting Japan is that streets here have no names. The streets of Tokyo have only recently started to be named, and naming is largely confined to the major thoroughfares and central areas, and in response to the confusion of foreigners, rather than to the demands of Tokyoites. Streets here function in the way in which they serve any human settlement, but the absence of street names tells a lot about Japanese culture and a specific organizing logic of the Japanese urban space. That logic is aerial, not linear. It favors private and static over common and dynamic. The address in streets without names consists of numbered areas, starting from the block, toward a smaller plot making it, then a parcel of land, and finally an object, as the place in which the lives of residents unfold. To find those places, one walks, rides, or drives through the gaps between blocks and parcels. Those gaps are the streets, and - they have no name.
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