Romanizing Japanese addresses

There was a follup question to my previous post about Japanese place names. How do I write Japanese addresses in English?

The answer: I use full rōmaji, not dropping suffixes, and not translating anything. For example:

〒231-0017
神奈川県横浜市中区港町1丁目1番地

This would be

1-1 Minato-chō, Naka-ku
Yokohama-shi, Kanagawa-ken
231-0017

Some points on this:

• Translating certain elements into English, like “Kanagawa Prefecture,” “Naka Ward,” etc. is far too much trouble. “Naka Ward, City of Yokohama, Kanagawa Prefecture” has a lot of unnecessary verbiage.
  • Plus, this is Japan. Addresses should be written in Japanese (rōmaji is one of the officially recognized writing systems for Japanese, so no, I’m not advocating that the whole world learns kanji). If English addresses are allowed, then why not French, German, and so on? How many languages should a Japanese postal worker need to do his or her job?
• Some people remove suffixes like “-chō,” “-shi,” and “-ken,” but this creates consistency problems. There are lots of names that require the suffixes for disambiguation—the usual suspects (cities and prefectures that share names) and others (I live in Kanagawa-ku in Yokohama-shi in Kanagawa-ken). And sometimes the suffix is part of the name (like any 〜本町 -honchō), so you either have to neuter the place name or leave only some suffixes on.

So that’s the rationale. Now if you’d like some quick and to-the-point rules for romanizing addresses, here are the guidelines I wrote for Wikipedia:

Japanese addresses should be written “Western style”, where the order of specificity is ”specific” to ”general”, e.g.

{building number} {neighborhood}, {ku, city / town, district}, {prefecture}

For example, 愛媛県西宇和郡伊方町湊浦123番地 should be

123 Minatoura, Ikata-chō, Nishiuwa-gun, Ehime-ken

This is the opposite of Japanese style. Other things to note:

• Include, but do not translate, suffixes such as -ken, -shi, -chō, -gun.
• Drop 丁目 (chōme), 番地 (banchi), etc. and include only the numbers, hyphenated. E.g. 1丁目2番地3号室 should be ”1-2-3”.
  • Note that when the neighborhood’s name contains a number, the neighborhood should not be reduced to that number. E.g. 三番町 should be ”Sanban-chō”, not ”3”.
• Include 甲 (kō), 乙 (otsu), 耕地 (kōchi), etc. after the ”banchi” numbers.
• 大字 (ōaza) and 字 (aza) should be treated as prefixes to the ”neighborhood” part of the address.
• Linebreaks are not required between any address elements.

With all that said, however, I should note that the closest to an official recommendation would be whatever Japan Post uses. According to their English website, they seem to use the same system except they drop the suffixes on prefecture names.

Either way, I’m sure your mail will arrive.