Japanese addressing system

The Japanese addressing system is used to identify a specific location in Japan. When written in Japanese characters, addresses start with the largest geographical entity and proceed to the most specific one. When written in Latin characters, addresses follow the convention used by most Western addresses and start with the smallest geographic entity (typically a house number) and proceed to the largest. The Japanese system is complex and idiosyncratic, the product of the natural growth of urban areas, as opposed to the systems used in cities that are laid out as grids and divided into quadrants or districts. Japanese addresses begin with the largest division of the country, the prefecture. Most of these are called ken (県), but there are also three other special prefecture designations: to (都) for Tokyo, dō (道) for Hokkaidō and fu (府) for the two urban prefectures of Osaka and Kyoto. Following the prefecture is the municipality. For a large municipality this is the city (shi, 市). Cities that have a large enough population (greater than 500,000 residents) and are regarded as such by order of the Cabinet of Japan are called designated cities, and are subdivided into wards (ku, 区), where in the prefecture of Tokyo, 23 of them are designated as the special ward with added authority to the mayors. For smaller municipalities, the address includes the district (gun, 郡) followed by the town (chō or machi, 町) or village (mura or son, 村). In Japan, a city is separate from districts, which contain towns and villages. For addressing purposes, municipalities may be divided into chō or machi (two different readings of the character 町, depending on the particular case) and/or aza (字). Despite using the same character as town, the machi here is purely a unit of address, not administration; likewise, there are also ku address divisions that are not administrative special wards. There are two common schemes: Municipality is divided first into machi and then into city districts (丁目 chōme).