This is a nice solution for a good chunk snail mail spam.
The next step would be to refuse to route mail other than to a digital address.
Next step, allow users to have short-lived, throwaway digital addresses which are nest to worthless to harvesters, who have mere weeks to act on them.
The post office should conceal the real addresses, not allowing outsiders access to the database. You shouldn't have to tell someone where you live in order to receive something by mail from them.
Nice idea but (according to the article) that's not how it works:
> Under the system, users can input these seven-digit codes on online shopping websites, and their addresses will automatically appear on the sites.
So the sites still use the physical address. In fact, the postal service itself doesn't even use the code.
The purpose is to simplify form input on websites, which was already solved by browser autocomplete.
Browser autocomplete works Really Badly for Japanese addresses (no standardized way of inputting addresses, including which font to use), so it should solve one major problem in Japan. That's different from e.g. my home country. Or almost anywhere else, for that matter.
TIL, I didn't know the situation was particularly bad in Japan.
I suppose the 'digital address' is solving the problem by effectively standardizing the input format.
Well Japan's physical address system everywhere except Kyoto is complete insanity. Every level get assigned numbers based on build order so block 6 can be across town from block 7 for no apparent reason.
Feel free to have any addressing system you like; it need not be number, street, city, state/province like many western countries. But it should at least make some logical sense.
I've lived in a town in the US that did the same thing. House numbers were assigned based on the order that properties were built up or split, so you had a lot of places where you'd have several houses in a row that had consecutive numbers, and then the next house would have a much higher number. One of my neighbors had lived there for decades, his house number was in the triple digits. Mine was 5 digits. Neighbor next to me was also 5 digits, but several thousand higher than mine because his house was built almost a decade after mine.
As a sister post said, the build order is that logical reason.
> so block 6 can be across town from block 7 for no apparent reason.
The time when they were built is the reason
I know but the only benefit of doing that is in the file cabinet in the government office you can easily determine which buildings are the oldest.
For every other possible use of addresses that system is much much much worse than the other systems in common use.
Why make life hard?
there's already an address alias system that things like Mercari (think Japanese eBay) has.
You buy something from somebody, they get a QR code and use that to get a delivery label. Delivery label doesn't have your address on it, only the delivery company knows where it's going.
Obviously it doesn't prevent something like "there's an airtag in the box" but it does prevent you having to tell the person selling you a used copy of Resident Evil 5 where you live.
arrange all people in a graph with distance of how well they 'know' each other. Then divide the graph into subnets, and implement an addressing scheme akin to IP v4.
Now we can have masked access-list, and block lists.