2 posts tagged with "Japan (ja-JP)"

For about a month our resolver used one method. It takes a postcode, finds the city polygon that contains the postcode's centroid, and reads off the city. The method got the Netherlands to 95% and Germany to 93%. Then we ran it on Japan, and Japan's gazetteer data has no city polygons.

This post covers two countries where the gazetteer data is sparse, what a geocoder can still do there, and where it stops. We resolved Japan to 94% by replacing the polygon lookup with a postal-authority lookup. Korea had the opposite problem. We could place the coordinate correctly for every postcode, but we could not confirm the name of the place most of the time.

The work raised three questions:

• What do you do when the gazetteer gives you points where you expected shapes?
• Does the method that worked for Japan generalize, or did it work only once?
• What happens when the map is missing data for the part of a country you most need?

In Tokyo, the address of Tokyo Tower is 〒105-0011 東京都港区芝公園4-2-8.

In English: "4-2-8 Shibakōen, Minato City, Tokyo 105-0011".

The Japanese form runs right-to-left compared to the English form. The prefecture (都道府県) comes first, then the city or ward (市区町村), then a district (丁目) and a block-number-style locator. There's no street name — just a grid.

This is why every rule-based address parser written for Western addresses breaks on Japan.