Out of curiosity, I've been looking up the addresses of the people from whom I've been importing PC Engine stuff. I thought I could just punch the addresses into Google Maps verbatim, but no!

First, you need to look at the prefecture. For example, Osaka. Next, you need to find the city, which in this case is also Osaka (sort of like New York, New York I suppose). Then, you need to find the correct "ward", which is sort of like a district-- for instance, Joto (not this person's real ward-- I'm making up a fake address here). Next, you need to break apart the dashed number, which so far as I can tell follows the format "Chome-Block-Building".

One of my packages came from "1-2-16". So once I hard their ward dialed in, I had to scour the map for their "chome", which seems to be like a sub-ward within a ward. Once I found that, I had to scour some more for block 2. I can't for the life of me figure out where Japanese building numbers are located since I don't see any mailboxes or numbers on the actual buildings, but in this case the only structure on block 2 was a giant apartment building.

If you count country, prefecture, city, ward, chome, and block, that's six distinct identifiers just to find where someone's house is located. Confusing! But then, in the United States we have country, state, city, and street, which is four identifiers-- maybe the Japanese find the US system as alien as I find Japan's?