One Japanese city gives directions instead of addresses

Most Japanese addresses skip streets almost entirely. A location is described by nesting: prefecture, city, ward, a numbered district, a numbered block, then a building number assigned however the block happened to fill in — not necessarily in the order you'd walk past them. It's a system built for the way cities actually grew, not for the convenience of finding anything on foot.

Kyoto is the exception, and the reason is 1,200 years old. The city was laid out on a grid in 794 CE, one of the few Japanese cities built that way on purpose rather than accreted over centuries. The official block-and-building system technically still applies, but the small numbered districts repeat so often — several unconnected areas can share the same name within one ward — that almost nobody actually uses it. Kyoto residents built their own workaround instead: an address that names an intersection and then tells you which direction to walk from it. Agaru means north of the crossing; sagaru, south; higashi-iru and nishi-iru, east or west. The city's own tourist tower lists its address as, roughly, "south of where Karasuma Street crosses Shichijō Street."

This unofficial system isn't folklore tolerated by the government — the post office and city agencies recognize it and deliver mail by it, alongside the official numbers nobody bothers reciting from memory.

A thousand years of urban planning, and the fix that stuck wasn't a better numbering scheme. It was just telling people which way to turn.