Day 12: part 4 - Address Hunting in Shibuya

I am still trying to get a hang of how Japanese addresses are situated. It seems that they pick out the city, then the neighborhood in the city which is demarcated by a chome number, then they number the blocks within that neighborhood, then buildings within the block, then the suite number within the building. Perhaps it seems easy enough when I say it like that, but it is challenging to figure out what chome number you are in, and even what neighborhood within a city that you might be in. There are very few signs that actually give this information. What makes it worse is that when you look at buildings, the address is not very prominently displayed, that is, the block number along with the building number.

Looking for the dance venue, I caught a break when I noticed a sign that said that the neighborhood museum, Shoto Museum was this way. That means that this must be the Shoto neighborhood then, right? Well I had nobody to ask or give me the answer, so I just continued on as if it were. The challenge was figuring out what neighborhood number I was in. I was looking for chome 1, but this could just as easliy be chome 2 or 3. I figured that since we were close to the main road, maybe this was chome 1. (Is that how these things are decided?) Then I kept looking for building addresses that might tell me what block number this is. Again, this seems like it would be straight forward, but if you just start numbering across a piece of paper, when do you decide to stop one row of numbers, and then continue numbering on a different row? This is part of what makes this block numbering system rather difficult for me to manage. I am willing to bet that to be a letter carrier, one must study the maps and numbers for quite a long time before he is able to pass some sort of test that makes him eligible to deliver mail. I can't imagine ever passing such a test. (From past experience, it seems clear that taxi drivers are not hip to the system, and cannot even help me find a place that ends up being across the street.)

In any case, I was proud of myself because I finally found the place, and figured out just a little something about the Japanese address system. Very interesting. I looked at my watch and realized that I was more than an hour late for the performance, which probably only lasted an hour anyway. All's well, though, becuase this means that I know exactly where to come tomorrow, right?