Getting a new address for our home
06 Sep 2025 | #housing | #japanWe are building our house in Tokyo. Previously there was an old house on this land with a garden. That house was taken down and the land got split into two (very common in Tokyo). Somehow the other land got to keep the original address, which meant we had to get a new one.
Addresses in Japan
Addresses in Japan are not based on the street name and number (like in some other countries) but rather on smaller and smaller sections of the city.
An address might look like this (I made it up):
東京都武蔵野市緑山2丁目15番8号 Tokyo, Musashino City, Midoriyama 2-15-8
Splitting this up:
- Tokyo is the prefecture
- Musashino City is the city
- Midoriyama is the chō (町), the neighborhood. There are 13 neighborhoods in Musashino City
- 2丁目 (chōme / numbered sub-neighborhood) are a numbered area within the neighborhood. One neighborhood can have anywhere between 1 to 8+ chōme, but in Musashino it is usually from 3 to 5
- 15番 - block number
- 8号 - building number
Here is a map of Musashino with the neighborhoods and the sub-neighborhoods (source):
These are the general addresses used on most documents and for sending mail. The official name for it is residential address system (住居表示), but most people wouldn’t even be aware that it has a name or that it is not the only address system.
Lot-number address system
There is another, address system, the lot number addresses: 地番 (jiban), sometimes called 土地番地 (tochi banchi). This is based on the land lot numbers in the official register (登記簿). It might look like this:
東京都武蔵野市緑山2丁目1234番56 Tokyo, Musashino City, Midoriyama 1234-56
Since all land is in the register, it seems that all land has this.
Our process
When we started building our house, it didn’t have a usual address (since our neighbor got the previous one), so all of our documents used the lot-number address.
About halfway through the construction (and one month after the house was standing) Ichijo applied at the city to get us a new address, and a bit later we got a notification that our address was decided (住居表示通知書). This also included a metal address plate that shows the new address, that we will attach at the front so that people can see the new address.
We actually got lucky, since apparently our neighbor’s number was the highest in this block, so they could just increase it by one. E.g. if our neighbor was 2-15-8 then our address became 2-15-9. There was a chance that 2-15-9 would have already been taken and then we could have ended up with something like 2-15-17 which could confuse delivery drivers if it is far from 16.
After getting the address
There doesn’t seem to be too much to do after getting the address, we just started using it on all new documents (currently working on home insurance, and there were some extra tax-related documents too, but I’ll write about those separately). There doesn’t seem to be any need to update the earlier documents that used the other address. My guess that this is due to how the system works: it is not that the address of our land changed, but rather that all lands have 2 addresses (one in each system) and we simply used the address from the other system.
I did however check our new address on Google Maps and made an edit to make it point to the correct house (somehow Google Maps guessed the location, and it was off by a few blocks).