Japanese address format in English

What 1-2-3 means in a Japanese address

District, block, building. Most Japanese streets have no name, so an address points at a block and then at a building inside it. The first number is the 丁目 (chome) district of the town, the second is the block number (街区符号), and the third is the building (住居番号).

Municipalities assign those two numbers under the Act on Residential Address Indication of 1962 (Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications), which replaced the older land-registry numbers in built-up areas. The same numbers are on the address plate fixed to buildings and utility poles nearby.

Written in Japanese the parts can be spelled out (渋谷区神宮前一丁目2番3号) or shortened to digits (渋谷区神宮前1-2-3). Both are the same address, and forms accept either.

Worked examples

Three real addresses, each taken from that organization’s own site. Every one has a postal code, a ward, a town and three numbers.

The ministry’s building name (中央合同庁舎第2号館) is left out of the roman-letter line because the ministry publishes no English form of it. Write your own building name the way your lease or your mailbox writes it.

Filling in a form that was built for another country

Forms from outside Japan ask for a street address, a city, a state and a ZIP code. Put the block number and town in the first address line, the room and building in the second, your ward or city in the city box and your prefecture in the state box. Japan Post asks for roman letters and Arabic numerals on international mail (Japan Post), and the same spelling works on a bank or airline form.

Two details break deliveries. A courier in Japan reads the block numbers and the building name, so never drop the building name or room number, and never translate the name: サクラハイツ (Sakura Heights) is not Cherry Blossom Heights. If the form has only one address line, keep the order and use commas.

What to put in the State/Province field for Japan

Enter your prefecture in roman letters, for example Tokyo, Kanagawa or Hokkaido. A prefecture is the level a foreign form calls a state or province. The Universal Postal Union (UPU) sheet on Japan names the prefecture as the largest geographical subdivision, 47 in all.

Japan Post's own address layout puts the city and the prefecture on one row and labels the prefecture Prefecture/State/Province (Japan Post). The UPU says an address in a town generally includes the prefecture, written after the city. The UPU's own example writes the prefecture in roman letters without its ending: Musashi-Murayama-shi, TOKYO. The UPU says prefecture names end in -ken, except Tokyo-to, Kyoto-fu, Osaka-fu and Hokkaido. If a drop-down offers only one spelling, pick the one for your prefecture.

If the form has no State box, put the prefecture after the city in the city line, as in Shibuya-ku, Tokyo. If it marks the box as required, fill it in. On mail, the UPU says the prefecture may be left out for the 20 principal cities (Yokohama, Osaka, Sapporo and others) and where the prefecture and the city have the same name, but a web form that requires the field still needs a value.

Addresses this page does not cover

• Kyoto city addresses, which name the nearest crossing and add 上ル (agaru, north) or 下ル (sagaru, south) for the direction from it.
• Older areas with no block-number system (住居表示), where the address ends in a land-registry number (番地) and there is no block number.
• Sapporo and other Hokkaido grids written as 北5条西2丁目 (North 5, West 2-chome).
• Reading kanji: this page converts nothing on its own. Type the roman letters you use, or copy them from your residence card.

Where you will be asked for this

In roman letters on foreign sites and bank forms, and in Japanese when you sign up for something here. The address on your residence card is the one a phone or bank contract is checked against, so use the same spelling on a SIM card, a bank account and your home internet. When you move, the ward office updates the card and everything else has to be told separately: the list is on moving in.

What a month in Japan costs, and what your pay leaves after rent and bills, is on the cost of living calculator.