Japan Post launches 'digital address' system

They're absolutely everywhere. Your tiny village might not have a grocery store, a school or an ATM, but it probably has a locker. Where my parents live (a village of ~2000 people), they have three. The vast majority of people have at least one in walking distance.

Before they became so popular, we used to do sign-on-delivery, leaving mail on your doorstep didn't become a thing here until covid. This made mail much harder to steal, but required you either to have somebody who would stay home all day, or to hunt down which neighbor got your package for you.

That sounds terrible from just about every perspective. What about people who work during that 30 minutes? Or who have mobility concerns? What about a parent who's young child just fell asleep? Should they all have to go to the pickup site? And let's not kid ourselves, it's not going to be nearby. Especially if you live in a rural area. And how do you open the locker when you get there? Do you need another app that tracks your every movement? No thank you, please just leave the package at my door.

The downside for carriers is that costs are unpredictable. Will they be shipping it a few miles or to the other side of the country?

The downside for the person ordering is that there is a race condition that makes it difficult for you to know where the thing will get delivered to. Perhaps you changed your location two days ago, and you are expecting a piece of furniture sometime soon. Did the furniture delivery process kick off before or after you changed your address?

Inpost - logistics startup in Poland managed to put lockers everywhere and you just receive sms when the parcel is there and you have 48h to pick it up

You can go whenever you want - simple and effective as hell

They disrupted delivery industry

I could also black list entities from delivering spam.

I'm reminded of the Taipei refuse trucks that play Fur Elise to remind you that it's the five-minute window in which you can put your bins in the street.

I'm not very optimistic about delivery improving, because it's a three-sided market. You don't get to choose which courier the sender uses, but you're really their customer.

Around here the Post already knows how to do this (I assume it's similar elsewhere), it's also used for government-related matters. But I guess other carriers do not.

I expect the overall results to be negative soon enough though : consider the issues USians have to endure with how (ab)used is their Social Security Number.

Apparently he new system works a bit like DNS: the physical location may change, but the symbolic name stays. The resolution is done at the order time, not at the delivery time.

I suppose it's because the numerous e-commerce sites already support the physical address system. With the post office resolving the 7-character symbolic address to a physical address requires approximately zero changes in their existing systems, it's just an extra API call on the frontend. Support for direct use of the 7-character address would require serious changes.

Also, the 7-character address resolved to a physical address right before the customer's eyes works as an extra sanity check, and should limit the number of orders to a wrong address.

Shops with which I’ve worked will have several different carriers pick up packages during the week. Some pickups are for city-local packages, where others are cross-province packages. Finally, lots of packages are delivered from the shop directly by motorbike. The logistics are quite different for each, and they use different providers depending on situation.

Shipping everything to one location that redistributes would explode in both costs and complexity.

One thing about the long physical address is that it adds a bit of redundancy. Misspelled or wrong name... still arrives. Misspelled street or city... might still arrive. I'm guessing 1 number off on that code and it's wrong. For the example in the story, a customer inputs the number, three store makes the call to Japan post and renders the physical address to the customer so they can verify before committing.

With your approach, the burden is on the post office to update their handling process.

With the implemented approach, nothing changes about the postal process, and the burden of work is shifted to the sender, who must look up the code for the recipient’s current address.

Oops now my package is going to Joe Blow on the other side of the country.

That’s probably why.

What do you imagine going wrong? In my mind, if I had a digital address code, one of the first things I would do after moving would be to update it. Plus, the article alludes to functionality that displays (+ confirms) the physical address anyway…

Somebody sends a letter to that address. Regular mail system forwards it to machines. There, machines stick a yellow or some color strip on it with its actual destination, then it comes to you. You could move and simply update usps.com address.

I believe it would be translate to your actual real address if you order package at ordering process

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.

> 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.

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://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_addressing_system

[0] https://www.eircode.ie/getting-an-eircode [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_codes_in_Japan

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?

Addresses are one of those things that “what programmers frequently get wrong about X”.

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.

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!

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.

Anyway, Japan has about 50 prefectures, I don't think any one of them being bigger than the Netherlands (maybe Hokkaido) so they could have a similar system by adding 2 digits at the beginning of the code.

  1. Japan Post lets you register your address to your Japan Post Account.
  2. No static short code is created for your address.
  3. Japan Post provides an API (like OAuth) for allowing you to persistently share your address location with a third party, say Rakuten, or Kuroneko Takkyubin, or something.
  4. Once you've linked it to those services, they can use this API to get your address at any point in time.
  5. You can unlink services whenever you want to revoke access, without changing any code.
  6. No way to request an address for a Japan Post account without permission granted.
  7. To handle cases like taxis, Japan Post can work with providers like GO Taxi, S.Ride, DiDi, etc. to do an authenticated one-time address share via NFC using the Japan Post App with the digital consoles already present in almost all taxis in major cities (no help for old taxis in the inaka, but that's a tradeoff).
     a. or alternatively, persistently link your GO Taxi, S.Ride, etc. accounts to Japan Post for the same purpose.
     b. and also potentially allowing to do such a key exchange with NFCs on smartphones or a standalone device, but probably taxi operators wouldn't be motivated enough to actually do that.

Yeah but you would still have better option than not being able to do that I think this is just move the security debt elsewhere which is bad/good it depends on theirs ends

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…

Alphanumeric codes are mathematically speaking a completely identical set to base 36 numerics

So memorizing a 7-digit code to enter address information without error seems like a useful feature to me (though admittedly not mind-blowingly so).

It could also be useful in other contexts such as sharing an address with someone verbally, over LINE, manually entering an address into a GPS, etc. Assuming the system actually catches on and the codes are universally supported in map apps.

This one causes me problems _all the time_. My address is like:

    12 XYZ Lane,
    XYZ Road,
    Town Name
    Postcode

So often enough, when continental European companies insist on a structured address, they will then render it back out as some variation of:

    XYZ Lane
    12
    XYZ Road
    Town Name
    Postcode

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.

If I ever change my email provider I just have to change the catch all rule.

> 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.

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.

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.

> 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.

[1]: https://lp.da.pf.japanpost.jp/#importantnotes

https://lp.da.pf.japanpost.jp/svg/digitaladdress_img_01_pc.s...

https://lp.da.pf.japanpost.jp/

More like minutes. Address input in Japan is a colossal pain in the ass. You have some sites that only allow half-width characters (e.g., ｷﾀ), some that only allow full width (キタ), some that require you to write your address twice and once in romaji, which can be half width (kita) or full width (ｋｉｔａ), some require you to write it in hiragana instead, sometimes numbers need to be full width(123 vs １２３), sometimes addresses have random unicode symbols like ・or Ⅲ (yes, Roman numerals are common in addresses) or ⑧ which may or may not be recognized, and more. There's no standardization in addresses at all and no street names, so every building gets some bizarre-ass name unique to it and the names sound like the title of a JRPG. You might even get stuff like 〜ＴＨＥﾋﾞｯｸﾞPALACEモナコ：Dréam Ⅱ〜

And the fun thing: every site has its own input standards, and no, they don't tell you what the error was. Most simply say "You can't submit. There's something wrong on this page." Some let you hit the send button, fail, and make you input everything all over again.

Having a code to input an address saves users loads of time and stress, assuming web developers implement it.

Have you moved addresses before? It is a giant pain to track down all the services which send you letter mail and change your address with them. With an extra layer of indirection you only need to update your address in one place when you move. Think of it like DNS for physical addresses.

When we move, we need to register our address change at the city hall. In terms of Big Brother, that's a given.

The problem is that we also need to change all bank, bills, etc. too. So this replaces the need for mail forwarding, for example.

Entering Japanese addresses on Japanese websites can often be a PITA, with weird requirements for where to split the address sections, fullwidth vs halfwidth, spacing, and even what type of dash you use (ー vs －). I don't think I've ever had Safari's auto-fill be able to do it successfully.

No, not really, Yu-ID is not the same as the My-ID (akin to social security number). So you wont have to reveal your social security to your taxi driver etc. if that was what you worried about.

>If you move you still need to notify them, although perhaps in Japan big brother already knows you've moved.

Yes you would have to change the physical address for your Yu-ID, but you don't need to tell all your acquaintances to update their greeting-card address list ( they can still send to the same Yu-ID)

Another case might be that you are temporarily living at a 'summer-residence' , or that work takes you to a new locations for months at the time.

Presumably it'd be pretty nice if you lost touch with someone.

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.

The missing street address used to be a big problem. The postal delivery people had (and still have, of course) a way to look up your address - which is really just the property number, in the area where I live) and find it on a map. Normal people couldn't. But now we can enter the property number into e.g. google maps, and it'll find the actual location. Which, of course, means that you need to be online with your digital device. Which I wouldn't be until recently (I've got this pocket wifi now), unless I was in a wifi area.

In my home country I can easily find any location just by someone telling me the street name and number. No map needed, no online presence.. my home address has a property id, known by the city, and a street address, for everybody else. Japan is like that, just that the street address is missing..