Which End Do You Start At?

An address written in Osaka and an address written in Manchester carry exactly the same information in almost exactly the opposite order. Neither city thinks its own order is strange.

In Britain and the United States, an address starts as small as it can and grows. First the flat number, then the house number and the street, then the town, then the postcode or the zip code at the end. In Japan, China and Korea it is generally the other way round: the largest area comes first and each line narrows. The country, then the region, then the city, then the district, then the block, and only at the end the building. In Japan the person's name is written last of all, because a person is the smallest item on the list.

Japan adds a second surprise for visitors. Most streets there have no name. The address does not point at a line of doors along a road; it points at a block, and then at a building inside that block. A visitor who is looking for a street sign can stand in exactly the right place and still feel lost.

It is worth asking why neither order ever loses this argument. A postal system is not one reader. It is a machine in a sorting office, then a plane, then a van, then a postman at the end of a street — and each of them needs a different line. Small-to-large gives the human being the first line and the machine the last one. Large-to-small does the reverse. Both work, because both are read from the outside in whichever way they are printed.

There is one rule everybody agrees on. On international mail, the name of the destination country goes on the final line, in the language of the country you are posting from, usually in capital letters. That line is not for the postman who will deliver the letter. He will never read it, and could not use it if he did. It is for the very first machine, which has only one decision to make: which plane.

So the two orders are opposites on paper and not in practice. The disagreement is not about what an address is. It is about which end you are expected to start reading.