> Support for direct use of the 7-character address would require serious changes.

No, it doesn't. You can just format that 7-character address like a valid address, essentially like:

番号0123456,日本

Fill any extra fields with placeholders or 0s as necessary.

The most you'll have to change is to maybe skip validation for those if you have address validation.

> skip validation

Here's whence real problems would begin.

What? That sort of vague dismissal with likely zero reasoning behind it doesn't really deserve a reply, but here you go anyways:

Many places don't even do address validation for regular addresses, because it's generally dogshit and either too lenient to be useful, or too restrictive to not filter out lots of valid addresses. Even Amazon just checks that the postal code and city match, nothing more. You can put in an entirely made up street name and they'll happily try to ship it.

If you really want to have validation, you can add parity bits to the number, so you can validate it fully client side.

As a business you may learn an address is no good when you're trying to request and print the digital shipping label - that is if you're lucky and the provider does any validation at that point for your in-country shipment (for international shipping there's usually simply none besides checking that they can route it at least to whoever they hand it over to). Worst case you'll get a return.

For these IDs the provider should be able to tell you pretty quickly they can't route the package, unlike when the customer gets their house number in their regular address wrong, which is usually only caught once the deliveryman learns that nobody with that surname lives there. If you're lucky he'll remember you live on number 21, not 12.

In any case as an online retailer you'll already be dealing with lots of returns anyways - invalid addresses is just one of many reasons your shipments don't reach the customer. Anyone who does shipment has a processes to handle these anyways. Using numbers that can be quickly determined to be correct/incorrect should actually improve things.

So again: What are you on about?