Japan is the perfect place for this because their house numbering system already requires you to look at a map to find it.
For those unfamiliar with it, numbers are incremented progressively around a block as doors are added to it. So the door "Block SanChome 4" could be on the opposite side of the building from "Block SanChome 6"
> Japan Post said Monday that it has launched a "digital address" system that links seven-digit combinations of numbers and letters to physical addresses.
Their proposal is useful when one wants to move addresses.
Doesn't it just give the shop a way to fetch the full address from some public API? I don't think you can just jot down that number on a box and have it delivered.
> Under the system, users can input these seven-digit codes on online shopping websites, and their addresses will automatically appear on the sites.
Yeah but now it's a personal identifier that actually moves with you when you move to a different physical address. In terms of privacy, that might just be worse.
You put a trusted intermediary (JP Post) that knows the address in the middle, and provide the seller with an identifier that the intermediary can associate with your physical address.
That’s already how it works if you buy something trough the online marketplaces here - Mercari et. al.
Mercari knows addresses of all counterparties, but the label that the seller puts on the package doesn’t have the destination address, and the label the package has when it reaches your door doesn’t have the seller’s address either.
I don’t think they’re saying that the system is intended to replace old addressing but that the new proposed system is fine because the old addressing system, like this new one, is not very good at providing intuitive physical wayfinding anyways.
It is even more complex than that: within a neighborhood you have "chome", then blocks, then buildings. All three levels are numbered chronologically and don't follow any kind of logical order. Oh, and streets don't have names. Honestly, I don't know how people did before modern navigation systems.
So yeah, this system looks like a godsend, I want to try it as soon as possible.
* I don't know if there is a translation for this word.
Indeed - at least now you can enter the property address (e.g. a four-digit number followed by a dash and another number, as in this small town) into google maps and it'll show you where it is. Not long ago it was more like driving in the general direction while hanging on the mobile phone and trying to agree on a landmark (e.g. a 7/11 or a tower or an office building) while trying to find the place.
Before mobile phones? Well, there's this big big sign in a park near the town center, and on that you can find family names on a kind of map.. of course that had this assumption that Nobody Never Moves. So, no, I don't know how people did this in the past..
"Where the Streets Have No Names", the U2 song. I wouldn't have imagined, but that's how it is.
> Honestly, I don't know how people did before modern navigation systems.
The good old: ask a local about it. Nowadays people seems so against just stopping a random passerby to ask them a question. (obviously not feasible with the huge amount of deliveries we do today but back then it would have been reserved for the very rich or rare occasions)
This is pretty much how we do it in Bulgaria as well, with almost all residential apartment buildings having no street address, it's just "City region X, building number Y". Online maps services are almost unusable for some places because they simply do not want to handle any system other than "street name + street number".
Even in the USA, the full 9-digit "Zip + 4" code will often identify a specific building. And some really big customers (e.g. the IRS) will have their own 5-digit zip code.
I wish we had those hanko. Signing off on any parcel is complete bullshit at the moment. Most delivery drivers neglect to ask for one (or that code you are supposed to give them for some delivery services), and when they do, you just make some arbitrary squiggle on their handheld device — it's not like you can actually do a faithful reproduction of your signature on those, even in 2025, and I certainly can't using my finger instead of a pencil or pen.
Yesterday a courier brought a pallet with my new drill press costing over €500. Signature required, but when I asked he told me not to worry, there was no need…
Most delivery companies enacted signature exemption rules for covid and are in no hurry to rescind them. Getting signatures takes time, which affects their bottom line.
I suppose it depends on your assessment of the risk. For me, taking an extra 30-45 minutes to pick something up is a pretty high bar. I've had a couple mis-deliveries at home but it's rare and think I eventually got the items. That's versus hundreds of other deliveries.
UPS closed my local facility to the public last month. Now I can only drop packages off at third parties for a fee, and the nearest hold location is over an hour away.
UPS was very unfriendly for consumer dropoffs for ages. That changed a bit. But seems to be headed back and I rarely get deliveries of Amazon stuff via UPS any longer.
If your drill press had been delivered to the wrong person, and the sender had chosen insured delivery (which automatically requires a signature), it would be easy to prove that the signature on file with the transporter did not match the actual signature of the recipient (i.e. you) (unless a fraudster forged your signature, that is).
Mind you, from what I understand, the seller is legally responsible up to the point of delivery in the Netherlands*. Therefore, even if your drill press hadn’t been sent with required signature, the shop would still be responsible in case it had been lost (but then the loss would come out of their own pocket, rather than that of the transporter).
Disclaimer: not a lawyer.
* Assuming you’re from the Netherlands due to your user name.
All that means is that as the receiving party there is absolutely no reason for me to sign anything, or even use my actual signature.
Indeed, if the pallet was delivered to the wrong address and someone just took it, the burden of proof would lie with the selling party. Of course, a reputable transporter will make sure the address is right (plus, people generally don't act as if they were indeed expecting a pallet delivered by lorry).
> All that means is that as the receiving party there is absolutely no reason for me to sign anything, or even use my actual signature.
Yes, but this actually doesn’t matter.
The only time when the signature on file is actually relevant is when the sender lodges a claim for non-delivery. In that case, it could be compared to your actual signature.
Conversely, if no claim is lodged, the package must have been successfully delivered.
Things have changed in the recent past, and you very rarely need your hanko. Maybe for marriage? Nowadays you cab register your signature at a bank and use it for any activity as well.
I bought a Steam Deck off amazon and they sent me a code on the day of delivery telling me to only provide this code to the delivery person face to face while receiving the parcel.
That seems like the perfect system because if you assume Amazon isn't trying to steal from you, the system can prove if the parcel was properly delivered or not.
The fundamental problem with deliveries is that you, as the recipient, are not the customer.
The merchant pays for thousands of deliveries, but you on the receiving end are at best getting a handful.
So the courier is incentivised to offer the best rates to the merchant while completely ignoring the requirements or preferences of the recipient.
Your only recourse is to complain to the shop, who might do something if the volume of complaints is high enough, but most likely they’ll just pass the buck to the courier…
The recipient getting their stuff stolen is a big deal for the merchant too, though.
Certainly for an expensive item, the customer may be out their time, but they are going to ask for a replacement or a refund or do a chargeback, the merchant is generally going to have to accede to the request, and the merchant ends up being out money.
So if the merchant decides to trade off security for delivery cost (by choosing a courier with a slack approach to verification), that's their prerogative and they are economically incentivized to make the right decision on that.
For delivery problems that don't result in a chargeback (the courier leaves it somewhere inconvenient, or claims you weren't in, etc, but it eventually gets to you) that's the situation where it becomes your problem and the merchant isn't much empowered or incentivized to fix it.
Agreed about the signing.. that's useless. But at least for some shipments with value we have to show an ID (not just any ID - I always carry my passport though), back in my home country. Just signing is worthless, in particular when that implies trying to "write" something on a touch screen using your finger.
Here in Japan there's typically this little circle where you're supposed to stamp you hanko.. but I just sign my name, with a pen, whether the parcel is for me or for my wife. But at least the delivery guy will have me read the form to verify that it's actually for someone in the household.
Not that I would prefer the hanko.. that idiocy just have to go. I can see no safety in the system, it's just a made-up stamp after all. It has no place in a modern world. And it's on the way out, as far as I understand, but I still hear stories about people forgetting the hanko when they go to the bank, and despite having passports and other IDs they're denied service. And you need to bring that thing everywhere for contracts and the like.. and everything has to be done by physical presence.
It's a pain in the ass here with Polish Post with such screens - my signature doesn't even resembles one on the paper. Private delivery companies just call you to see if you're at home; you also have mobile apps and most of the time is possible to redirect packages to parcel machines. And these spawn like "shrooms after rain", as we say. They cared for codes, manual signing during pandemic but now - not really.
RFID isn't smart; it's just a little chip that harvests energy from being illuminated by a radio wave signal from the terminal, and reflects back a code. (Well, that's a passive tag; there are self-powered ones also.)
Smart cards contain a considerable embedded system for transactional processing; it's quite different from just transmitting an ID.
Correct; an RFID tag cannot hold a cryptographic secret and perform a calculation with it to prove that it knows the secret, without revealing the secret. It has no compute capability. It's just a kind of reflective beacon.
RFID: Radio Frequency Identification: passive powered by RF, returns data when powered.
NFC: Near Field Communications, is a protocol for communications, built on RFID, includes polling for readers and protocols for defined crypto and data storage/retrieval.
EMV: Eurocard/Mastercard/Visa standard for the data and crypto operations for an EMV chip, extended from physical by the use of NFC for contactless payments, primarily by replicating the data on the magstripe and adding some additional crypto and dynamic elements.
EMV is one standard for how to use an NFC card, there are others, primarily used for transit.
When I read 7-digit my first thought was this seems a bit short sighted. Then I saw the the address was going to be a combination of letters and numbers. Since this is the English page for The Japan Times I'll give them a pass on using the wrong word.
I was looking for this comment as I thought 7 digits wasn't enough for the 55,000,000+ households in Japan. I missed the fact that it's alphanumeric - problem solved.
This seems more interesting, as it's not a code for a physical address but a lookup key for one.
You can update your code to point to a new address when you move:
> Their digital addresses will not change even if their physical addresses change. Their new addresses will be linked to the codes if they submit notices of address changes.
Non-ASCII symbols are kind of non-canonical and don't parse well, even today. Japanese developers are deeply aware of that, so generated identifiers in Japanese systems are almost always either hyphenated numeric or occasionally ASCII alphanumeric. Only when said identifier are guaranteed to never need programmatic handling, or when the system can have complete control of input and output, non-ASCII characters start appearing.
This is a key distinction. Plus codes map to a 14m x 14m square area and aren't aware of things like building units or elevation.
If you live in a high rise apartment, a plus code does not identify you precisely. Sadly to do this you need some knowledge of a structure's internals. It makes sense it's being done on the national level in Japan.
Or even just addresses that are split between multiple pluscodes?
For example, a duplex where the front door of each unit is adjacent to the other. Even at the 4m resolution, that means both units front doors (and thus street addresses) can fall into one single pluscode.
The ZIP code system in the US CAN somewhat work the same way.
The usual 5 digit ZIP code routes to your Post Office. The longer ZIP+4 code routes more detailed locations: a city block, an apartment building. The even longer ZIP+6 code goes to something called delivery point, which to my understanding is basically a single mailbox. The ZIP+6 code is in fact embedded in the bar code sprayed onto the mail piece.
he said "somewhat work the same way". For a person who doesn't care about whether they have to get a new code when they move, the systems are equivalent in their value proposition. Thus is the case for most things that "somewhat work the same way".
If there was a zip code that was just virtual PO Boxes, it could use the existing change of address machinery to slap the actual delivery address on when addressed with a virtual box. Assuming they used an entire sectional center facility for it, you could have 100 zip codes, with 6 digits of unique delivery points, so 100 million virtual boxes.
This idea is so close to being great though. It just needs a couple changes:
> Under the system, users can input these seven-digit codes on online shopping websites, and their addresses will automatically appear on the sites.
1. The site shouldn’t get your address at all. They print the code on the package, mail it to Japan Post, and Japan Post takes care of delivering it to you.
2. You should be able to generate new codes arbitrarily.
i.e. A service like Apple’s Hide My Email, but for physical mail.
Japan Post represents only a portion of shipping providers in Japan, for our idea to work others will need the same privileged access to the system: Yamato, Sagawa etc.
This will also require to alter the package label on the last mile because requiring the courier to scan every package or letter before they could even see an apartment number will slow things down to a crawl.
The relabeling to show the actual address is something that carriers are already doing for C2C marketplaces and their anonymous shipping features already.
The "important notes" section on the Japanese page[1] says that you can disable / delete an address at any time and create a new one. If I used this I would rotate every so often and at a minimum for each move. I'm a bit concerned for people that don't understand the risks of updating these. Anyone that's ever seen this code being able to lookup the person's address across moves is scary. I don't feel like this convenience warrants the risk of having this feature, personally. It's already convenient enough to just limit the input required for updating third parties to an alphanumeric code without allowing updating the addresses.
I thought this was something else... my cousin has been living in Japan 10+ years in a small town for on the other side of Mt Fuji from Tokyo and I went and stayed with him for a couple of weeks. Every day (maybe twice? I can't remember) loudspeakers on poles around the neighborhood would start playing amateurish announcements - some very old man half-asleep reading a list of events, news, etc. I was hoping they turned it digital and just sent it to your phone. For how peaceful things normally were in this town it was disruptive.
In Okinawa I get music in the morning when kids need to go to school as well as random announcements.
Japan has always been weird like that - people are generally quiet and respectful of others, but when it comes to trucks driving around blaring out political speeches, or a "pay to take your large trash" van playing music while driving around to advertise its presence, all bets are off.
That thing is an air raid siren. It's broadcast from city or town offices, and everyone believes it's for disaster mitigation. Sure, but they run complete human in loop system readiness tests each day every day. You don't need that level of assured reliability for those community announcements.
Those can be anything from daily announcements telling kids to get home before dark, testing the emergency announcement system, reminding people about today's festival, or asking people to be on the look-out for 89-year-old Takahashi-san who was last seen at the vegetable stand earlier this morning.
Where I am there's now only some music at 17:00, ideally that should announce that it's time to leave work and go home, ffs.. but as this is Japan, it doesn't seem to serve a purpose - people don't go home. That music used to be a siren until a few years ago. I like the melody better.
We do get the aforementioned trucks driving around all day announcing loudly that they'll take your trash, for payment.. but it's very rare now. And the pole sellers seem to have disappeared entirely. I could use a new pole though.. for drying clothes. There has fortunately never been any political speech trucks around here. The town is too small I assume.
The German Post already has "digital stamps", you buy them online and then you just have to write a couple of symbols on the envelope.
If you combined these together you would get a letter which can be fully paid for and addressed by writing a couple of symbols on it, only meaningful to the computer system. In a way this is making the physical world quite digital.
I wonder how it works if you have two addresses. (I suppose one possible answer could be that it just doesn't, you register your main one, if you want the other you have to enter it in full.)
This is a nice solution for a good chunk snail mail spam.
The next step would be to refuse to route mail other than to a digital address.
Next step, allow users to have short-lived, throwaway digital addresses which are nest to worthless to harvesters, who have mere weeks to act on them.
The post office should conceal the real addresses, not allowing outsiders access to the database. You shouldn't have to tell someone where you live in order to receive something by mail from them.
Browser autocomplete works Really Badly for Japanese addresses (no standardized way of inputting addresses, including which font to use), so it should solve one major problem in Japan. That's different from e.g. my home country. Or almost anywhere else, for that matter.
Well Japan's physical address system everywhere except Kyoto is complete insanity. Every level get assigned numbers based on build order so block 6 can be across town from block 7 for no apparent reason.
Feel free to have any addressing system you like; it need not be number, street, city, state/province like many western countries. But it should at least make some logical sense.
How do you number buildings when you have an empty road and you add them one by one at different points in time?
Also, naming roads does not change the problem much. You still have no idea where a place is if you are not on the correct road so you need a map in any case
I've lived in a town in the US that did the same thing. House numbers were assigned based on the order that properties were built up or split, so you had a lot of places where you'd have several houses in a row that had consecutive numbers, and then the next house would have a much higher number. One of my neighbors had lived there for decades, his house number was in the triple digits. Mine was 5 digits. Neighbor next to me was also 5 digits, but several thousand higher than mine because his house was built almost a decade after mine.
As a sister post said, the build order is that logical reason.
there's already an address alias system that things like Mercari (think Japanese eBay) has.
You buy something from somebody, they get a QR code and use that to get a delivery label. Delivery label doesn't have your address on it, only the delivery company knows where it's going.
Obviously it doesn't prevent something like "there's an airtag in the box" but it does prevent you having to tell the person selling you a used copy of Resident Evil 5 where you live.
arrange all people in a graph with distance of how well they 'know' each other. Then divide the graph into subnets, and implement an addressing scheme akin to IP v4.
Now we can have masked access-list, and block lists.
This is Ireland's postal code system. There's a small level of privacy built in, specific to an address (many taxi drivers ask for this) and 7 digits long. Web forms use it too, so quite common in normal life.
Surprisingly the postal service, An Post, don't use the postal code as their primary way to direct mail (as far as I understand) .
He's mostly, but not fully correct when talking about the randomness. The first 3 characters match the Dublin postal districts. People living in Dublin 12 start with D12. On one hand, maybe that's useful but on the other hand, it's a way for people to potentially discriminate based on the "good/bad" areas of the city.
> An Post, don't use the postal code as their primary way to direct mail (as far as I understand) .
I'm not sure how the delivery system works exactly, but I think they use the eircode? Especially in the countryside there often isn't much more than that. At my previous address the street doesn't even have a name; but post addressed to "my name, town, eircode" got delivered.
Also when the eircode was first introduced it really messed up the delivery, which seems to indicate they're using it?
Sorry to say this is not the same. According to [0], the eircode is tied to the address, which Japan has already implemented a 7 digit postal code system. What this new way is trying to do instead is you can get a new digital address, in 7 character alphanumeric character, that uniquely addressed to you. So today you maybe in Tokyo, maybe a year later in Osaka. The postal code of your address changes, but the digital address will still be the same.
So I HOPE you cant mis-type an email address and get it sent to someone else. I get so many bank account statements, library book and device rental notices, car is ready for pickup, or from repair etc notices. ALL APPARENTLY from Bozos who dont know their OWN email addresses. On the other hand on the 2nd notice *I usually do not get a third) when I tell garages/ car impounds / parking spaces to sell the damn thing as Im done with it.
Almost perfect. Along with mail that follows you, I’ve always wanted a system that lets you grant the right to send you mail, that you can hard revoke. Physical and digital. We could call it “slightly more complex mail protocol”. No more layers of filters, just grant and revoke.
If we could use use gps co-ordinate then it would make all the life simpler. Imagine how many time you type those address info on the forms and not to forget typing mistakes.
I don't know, I feel like "38.57266, -9.19670" is harder to remember than "55 bridge street, foobar city, mexico". Maybe What3Words would be better: "///obscure.loftily.tasting", but it does not give any idea on locality.
We could use Google Plus codes instead.
They look like 3W4J+622 Calgary, Alberta.
The digits after the + can be added or removed to increase of decrease accuracy. They can but need not be also be replaced partially with a locality like Calgary, Alberta.
Why not an email address that you can add a physical address to on the platform of your national postal service? Have parcels be sent to the email address, and the postal service resolves that at dispatch time to your current address. No hassle when moving, no spreading your address everywhere, easy to remember.
This is a virtual postcard, so while I can read it in my email or on usps.com, I won’t necessarily find a paper copy delivered.
It is my understanding that commercial mailings can also use this mechanism. I receive some marketing as original JPEG quality, rather than being scanned in grayscale.
It's more of a URL shortener. Users are assigned 7-digit alphanumeric code that macroexpands into full address on participating websites as well as on some paper application processes. There are few safety checks to prevent abuses, and linked address can be changed later when you move.
Many online address forms in Japan uses equivalent of ZIP code to do similar already, but the expanded address are as granular as ZIP codes - I always fill in the rest of the address, but if I think about it, the fractions of users who do religiously verify and clarify the addresses must be less than 100%. I suppose this code will initially solve that problem with minimal infra changes for both users and the PO.
Entering building names can be a bit of a pain. I'm not even sure if it's required - according to Wikipedia it looks like you can just keep adding dashes until you eventually get to room number (e.g. 4-5-10-103) [1]. But a lot of address forms ask for it, so I end up entering it anyway.
The building name is required in many cases because two buildings next to each other will often have the same ban-chi-go (i.e. 4-5-10 could refer to two apartment buildings that were originally on the same lot, both with room 103).
It's exceedingly common, not just some edge-case you see every once in a while.
One thing that wasn't quite clear to me is whether your code is what e-commerce companies record, or the expanded address.
Hopefully it's the code, because the benefit of this is that if you move, you wouldn't need to update your address with a bajillion different companies, just the post office.
Quick question - you wrote "There are few safety checks" - did you mean "There are a few safety checks"? I'm trying to figure out if this is implemented badly or not.
The basic design outlined in "important notice" section on brochure page[1] sounds a bit simplistic to be honest - it doesn't seem to have a PIN or really advanced checks, more towards "we've done our homework" checks, but OTOH, they did seem to have done homeworks.
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[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 259 ms ] threadFor those unfamiliar with it, numbers are incremented progressively around a block as doors are added to it. So the door "Block SanChome 4" could be on the opposite side of the building from "Block SanChome 6"
> Japan Post said Monday that it has launched a "digital address" system that links seven-digit combinations of numbers and letters to physical addresses.
Their proposal is useful when one wants to move addresses.
> Under the system, users can input these seven-digit codes on online shopping websites, and their addresses will automatically appear on the sites.
That’s already how it works if you buy something trough the online marketplaces here - Mercari et. al.
Mercari knows addresses of all counterparties, but the label that the seller puts on the package doesn’t have the destination address, and the label the package has when it reaches your door doesn’t have the seller’s address either.
So yeah, this system looks like a godsend, I want to try it as soon as possible.
* I don't know if there is a translation for this word.
The good old: ask a local about it. Nowadays people seems so against just stopping a random passerby to ask them a question. (obviously not feasible with the huge amount of deliveries we do today but back then it would have been reserved for the very rich or rare occasions)
It can be even more granular than that. ZIP+4+2 is a thing.
Yesterday a courier brought a pallet with my new drill press costing over €500. Signature required, but when I asked he told me not to worry, there was no need…
https://www.ups.com/us/en/track/change-delivery
https://www.fedex.com/en-us/shipping/hold-at-location.html
If your drill press had been delivered to the wrong person, and the sender had chosen insured delivery (which automatically requires a signature), it would be easy to prove that the signature on file with the transporter did not match the actual signature of the recipient (i.e. you) (unless a fraudster forged your signature, that is).
Mind you, from what I understand, the seller is legally responsible up to the point of delivery in the Netherlands*. Therefore, even if your drill press hadn’t been sent with required signature, the shop would still be responsible in case it had been lost (but then the loss would come out of their own pocket, rather than that of the transporter).
Disclaimer: not a lawyer.
* Assuming you’re from the Netherlands due to your user name.
Indeed, if the pallet was delivered to the wrong address and someone just took it, the burden of proof would lie with the selling party. Of course, a reputable transporter will make sure the address is right (plus, people generally don't act as if they were indeed expecting a pallet delivered by lorry).
Yes, but this actually doesn’t matter.
The only time when the signature on file is actually relevant is when the sender lodges a claim for non-delivery. In that case, it could be compared to your actual signature.
Conversely, if no claim is lodged, the package must have been successfully delivered.
Disclaimer: not a lawyer.
That seems like the perfect system because if you assume Amazon isn't trying to steal from you, the system can prove if the parcel was properly delivered or not.
The merchant pays for thousands of deliveries, but you on the receiving end are at best getting a handful.
So the courier is incentivised to offer the best rates to the merchant while completely ignoring the requirements or preferences of the recipient.
Your only recourse is to complain to the shop, who might do something if the volume of complaints is high enough, but most likely they’ll just pass the buck to the courier…
Certainly for an expensive item, the customer may be out their time, but they are going to ask for a replacement or a refund or do a chargeback, the merchant is generally going to have to accede to the request, and the merchant ends up being out money.
So if the merchant decides to trade off security for delivery cost (by choosing a courier with a slack approach to verification), that's their prerogative and they are economically incentivized to make the right decision on that.
For delivery problems that don't result in a chargeback (the courier leaves it somewhere inconvenient, or claims you weren't in, etc, but it eventually gets to you) that's the situation where it becomes your problem and the merchant isn't much empowered or incentivized to fix it.
Here in Japan there's typically this little circle where you're supposed to stamp you hanko.. but I just sign my name, with a pen, whether the parcel is for me or for my wife. But at least the delivery guy will have me read the form to verify that it's actually for someone in the household.
Not that I would prefer the hanko.. that idiocy just have to go. I can see no safety in the system, it's just a made-up stamp after all. It has no place in a modern world. And it's on the way out, as far as I understand, but I still hear stories about people forgetting the hanko when they go to the bank, and despite having passports and other IDs they're denied service. And you need to bring that thing everywhere for contracts and the like.. and everything has to be done by physical presence.
we call those contactless smart cards
Smart cards contain a considerable embedded system for transactional processing; it's quite different from just transmitting an ID.
Makes it utterly useless as a digital signature then.
EMV, NFC, and RFID are all related technologies which may underlie “tap to pay / sign” features.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contactless_payment
RFID: Radio Frequency Identification: passive powered by RF, returns data when powered.
NFC: Near Field Communications, is a protocol for communications, built on RFID, includes polling for readers and protocols for defined crypto and data storage/retrieval.
EMV: Eurocard/Mastercard/Visa standard for the data and crypto operations for an EMV chip, extended from physical by the use of NFC for contactless payments, primarily by replicating the data on the magstripe and adding some additional crypto and dynamic elements.
EMV is one standard for how to use an NFC card, there are others, primarily used for transit.
[1] https://aruarian.dance/blog/japan-ic-cards/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_theorem_of_softwar...
Alphanumeric codes are mathematically speaking a completely identical set to base 36 numerics
7 characters made up of letters and numbers let you find a specific building.
You can update your code to point to a new address when you move:
> Their digital addresses will not change even if their physical addresses change. Their new addresses will be linked to the codes if they submit notices of address changes.
https://lp.da.pf.japanpost.jp/svg/digitaladdress_img_01_pc.s...
https://lp.da.pf.japanpost.jp/
If you live in a high rise apartment, a plus code does not identify you precisely. Sadly to do this you need some knowledge of a structure's internals. It makes sense it's being done on the national level in Japan.
For example, a duplex where the front door of each unit is adjacent to the other. Even at the 4m resolution, that means both units front doors (and thus street addresses) can fall into one single pluscode.
Debatable considering it's based on lat/lon only.
> used for deliveries in many countries
Source? Their own website only lists 3 use cases, and only one is used for mail delivery, and even that is in Kolkata only.
Locating a person or business from that entrance is a separate concern. Which must not involve 3D or indoor maps.
>Locating a person or business from that entrance is a separate concern. Which must not involve 3D or indoor maps.
No, it isn't. If it were a separate concern what would be the point of encoding the address in the first place?
The usual 5 digit ZIP code routes to your Post Office. The longer ZIP+4 code routes more detailed locations: a city block, an apartment building. The even longer ZIP+6 code goes to something called delivery point, which to my understanding is basically a single mailbox. The ZIP+6 code is in fact embedded in the bar code sprayed onto the mail piece.
This doesn't sound good for privacy or security, though it's a nice convenience function.
> Under the system, users can input these seven-digit codes on online shopping websites, and their addresses will automatically appear on the sites.
1. The site shouldn’t get your address at all. They print the code on the package, mail it to Japan Post, and Japan Post takes care of delivering it to you.
2. You should be able to generate new codes arbitrarily.
i.e. A service like Apple’s Hide My Email, but for physical mail.
My guess is that's already planned, but they don't put all details in the first press release.
This will also require to alter the package label on the last mile because requiring the courier to scan every package or letter before they could even see an apartment number will slow things down to a crawl.
[1]: https://lp.da.pf.japanpost.jp/#importantnotes
So they've added an MMU (Mail Management Unit).
Japan has always been weird like that - people are generally quiet and respectful of others, but when it comes to trucks driving around blaring out political speeches, or a "pay to take your large trash" van playing music while driving around to advertise its presence, all bets are off.
We do get the aforementioned trucks driving around all day announcing loudly that they'll take your trash, for payment.. but it's very rare now. And the pole sellers seem to have disappeared entirely. I could use a new pole though.. for drying clothes. There has fortunately never been any political speech trucks around here. The town is too small I assume.
He wanted to tell everyone that tonight on TV there's an episode of a show with a scene filmed at the local beach. 6am!
The German Post already has "digital stamps", you buy them online and then you just have to write a couple of symbols on the envelope.
If you combined these together you would get a letter which can be fully paid for and addressed by writing a couple of symbols on it, only meaningful to the computer system. In a way this is making the physical world quite digital.
But this thing sounds like a Rube Goldberg machine. A much simpler solution is to have the subscriber log into their account and change their address
The next step would be to refuse to route mail other than to a digital address.
Next step, allow users to have short-lived, throwaway digital addresses which are nest to worthless to harvesters, who have mere weeks to act on them.
The post office should conceal the real addresses, not allowing outsiders access to the database. You shouldn't have to tell someone where you live in order to receive something by mail from them.
> Under the system, users can input these seven-digit codes on online shopping websites, and their addresses will automatically appear on the sites.
So the sites still use the physical address. In fact, the postal service itself doesn't even use the code.
The purpose is to simplify form input on websites, which was already solved by browser autocomplete.
I suppose the 'digital address' is solving the problem by effectively standardizing the input format.
Feel free to have any addressing system you like; it need not be number, street, city, state/province like many western countries. But it should at least make some logical sense.
The time when they were built is the reason
For every other possible use of addresses that system is much much much worse than the other systems in common use.
Why make life hard?
Also, naming roads does not change the problem much. You still have no idea where a place is if you are not on the correct road so you need a map in any case
As a sister post said, the build order is that logical reason.
You buy something from somebody, they get a QR code and use that to get a delivery label. Delivery label doesn't have your address on it, only the delivery company knows where it's going.
Obviously it doesn't prevent something like "there's an airtag in the box" but it does prevent you having to tell the person selling you a used copy of Resident Evil 5 where you live.
Now we can have masked access-list, and block lists.
This is Ireland's postal code system. There's a small level of privacy built in, specific to an address (many taxi drivers ask for this) and 7 digits long. Web forms use it too, so quite common in normal life.
Surprisingly the postal service, An Post, don't use the postal code as their primary way to direct mail (as far as I understand) .
Addresses are one of those things that “what programmers frequently get wrong about X”.
https://www.eircode.ie/business/business-overview
I'm not sure how the delivery system works exactly, but I think they use the eircode? Especially in the countryside there often isn't much more than that. At my previous address the street doesn't even have a name; but post addressed to "my name, town, eircode" got delivered.
Also when the eircode was first introduced it really messed up the delivery, which seems to indicate they're using it?
Sorry I have it the wrong way round, there was earlier confusion which led to the below article and my incorrect understanding.
The system uses the eircode and the postman uses the address. (It makes sense a person would use the street address.)
https://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/an-post-c...
[0] https://www.eircode.ie/getting-an-eircode [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_codes_in_Japan
All that's different with Japans new system is that the code will be transferrable whereas Ireland's is not.
When I sign in to Informed Delivery, every month or so the USPS sends a postcard advertising their podcast (“Mailin’ It!”)
https://usps-mailin-it.simplecast.com/
This is a virtual postcard, so while I can read it in my email or on usps.com, I won’t necessarily find a paper copy delivered.
It is my understanding that commercial mailings can also use this mechanism. I receive some marketing as original JPEG quality, rather than being scanned in grayscale.
Many online address forms in Japan uses equivalent of ZIP code to do similar already, but the expanded address are as granular as ZIP codes - I always fill in the rest of the address, but if I think about it, the fractions of users who do religiously verify and clarify the addresses must be less than 100%. I suppose this code will initially solve that problem with minimal infra changes for both users and the PO.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_addressing_system
It's exceedingly common, not just some edge-case you see every once in a while.
Hopefully it's the code, because the benefit of this is that if you move, you wouldn't need to update your address with a bajillion different companies, just the post office.
1: https://lp.da.pf.japanpost.jp/