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1. 

   janne says

   • January 28, 2010

   Well, except that streets also do have names in Japan. It depends on which city you look at. Sapporo really have no street names at all. Tokyo, like Kyoto, has, if I remember correctly, names on major throughfares but not smaller streets (and Kyoto blocks are not numbered but referenced by nearby intersections). Osaka has names on all big streets and many of the smaller, busy ones.

   And in Osaka, at least, many more streets used to have names than they do now. Presumably the street names were removed for efficiency reasons (the same name could appear on a number of different streets in the city). The old street names live on locally, though, so somebody may well give you directions using those names even though they don’t appear on any map.

   I wonder if other old cities in Japan similarly used to have named streets?

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