[bemmu]

Rest of the world: "Please take me to such and such address"

Japan: "Please start driving towards <famous landmark>. You know that convenience store near there? Yeah that's the one, can you take me there for starters. OK, now still continue a bit forward. Now turn right in the next intersection. Yes, right here, next take a left..."

[yladiz]

To be fair, while it's common for western (US/Canada) taxis to bring you to somewhere based on address (or intersection), it's not common in much of the rest of the world and they rely on landmarks much more often. Any Latin American country and many Asian countries are the same, in that you tell them a landmark and go from there.

For example, did you know that it wasn't until sometime in the last couple years that South Korea implemented a standardized address system? You can't tell a taxi driver to go to an "address" cuz the address of your hotel didn't exist a couple years ago, even if the hotel did, so you have to tell them the closest landmark.

[masklinn]

Most japanese GPS will take landline numbers as that's more reliable (and much, much easier to input) than addresses. The alternative is a proprietary location system (Denso's MAPCODE).

[Mindless2112]

It doesn't help that a lot of streets in Japan don't have names.

I have a friend living in a small town in Japan that can't get mail at his apartment because the building doesn't have an address. He has his mail delivered to the closest building that does have an address, and they give it to him.

[masklinn]

> It doesn't help that a lot of streets in Japan don't have names.

That's because Japan doesn't generally use street-based addressing, it's area-based from top to bottom, so street names are replaced by block numbers (I guess small villages could be blockless and jump directly from village to building as well).

[rtpg]

All taxis I've gotten into had a GPS and I could just give the address.