Japan Post launches 'digital address' system

Poland adopted parcel lockers on a massive scale, and they mostly solve that problem. It's such a good idea; I'm really surprised other countries haven't followed suit.

They're absolutely everywhere. Your tiny village might not have a grocery store, a school or an ATM, but it probably has a locker. Where my parents live (a village of ~2000 people), they have three. The vast majority of people have at least one in walking distance.

Before they became so popular, we used to do sign-on-delivery, leaving mail on your doorstep didn't become a thing here until covid. This made mail much harder to steal, but required you either to have somebody who would stay home all day, or to hunt down which neighbor got your package for you.

> You (and everyone else in the street), will get a notification that its outside for the next 30 minutes - miss it, and it'll go get delivered to a nearby pickup site.

That sounds terrible from just about every perspective. What about people who work during that 30 minutes? Or who have mobility concerns? What about a parent who's young child just fell asleep? Should they all have to go to the pickup site? And let's not kid ourselves, it's not going to be nearby. Especially if you live in a rural area. And how do you open the locker when you get there? Do you need another app that tracks your every movement? No thank you, please just leave the package at my door.

> I think there is value though in carriers saying "no, wait, I'll do the lookup when I am ready to deliver!", because then I order something today with a 3-month lead time and if I move house, the delivery "follows me" to my new location.

The downside for carriers is that costs are unpredictable. Will they be shipping it a few miles or to the other side of the country?

The downside for the person ordering is that there is a race condition that makes it difficult for you to know where the thing will get delivered to. Perhaps you changed your location two days ago, and you are expecting a piece of furniture sometime soon. Did the furniture delivery process kick off before or after you changed your address?

>I actually expect some of the rapid delivery networks to get a bit more like this - I predicted with friends about 5 years ago at some point your Amazon delivery is going to be in a locker on the back of a self-driving vehicle. You (and everyone else in the street), will get a notification that its outside for the next 30 minutes - miss it, and it'll go get delivered to a nearby pickup site. Imagine if there was dynamic routing so that the parcel just "finds me" if I'm at work, or a bar after work... obviously I might want choices and options and so on, but I think the idea of parcels just going to where you sleep, whether you are there or not, is going to look quaint in 30 years time.

Inpost - logistics startup in Poland managed to put lockers everywhere and you just receive sms when the parcel is there and you have 48h to pick it up

You can go whenever you want - simple and effective as hell

They disrupted delivery industry

For me the privacy part of site not knowing we’re I live would be great.

I could also black list entities from delivering spam.

> at some point your Amazon delivery is going to be in a locker on the back of a self-driving vehicle. You (and everyone else in the street), will get a notification that its outside for the next 30 minutes

I'm reminded of the Taipei refuse trucks that play Fur Elise to remind you that it's the five-minute window in which you can put your bins in the street.

I'm not very optimistic about delivery improving, because it's a three-sided market. You don't get to choose which courier the sender uses, but you're really their customer.

Not having your address passed around 3rd-party sellers is a win on its own

> I think there is value though in carriers saying "no, wait, I'll do the lookup when I am ready to deliver!", because then I order something today with a 3-month lead time and if I move house, the delivery "follows me" to my new location.

Around here the Post already knows how to do this (I assume it's similar elsewhere), it's also used for government-related matters. But I guess other carriers do not.

I expect the overall results to be negative soon enough though : consider the issues USians have to endure with how (ab)used is their Social Security Number.

> Their digital addresses will not change even if their physical addresses change.

Apparently he new system works a bit like DNS: the physical location may change, but the symbolic name stays. The resolution is done at the order time, not at the delivery time.

I suppose it's because the numerous e-commerce sites already support the physical address system. With the post office resolving the 7-character symbolic address to a physical address requires approximately zero changes in their existing systems, it's just an extra API call on the frontend. Support for direct use of the 7-character address would require serious changes.

Also, the 7-character address resolved to a physical address right before the customer's eyes works as an extra sanity check, and should limit the number of orders to a wrong address.

This sounds like cross-shipping, where you ship to a distribution centre which then ships to the final destination. My guess is that this is more expensive and slower for a lot of cases (this is typically cheaper for extremely high volumes or cross-continental shipping).

Shops with which I’ve worked will have several different carriers pick up packages during the week. Some pickups are for city-local packages, where others are cross-province packages. Finally, lots of packages are delivered from the shop directly by motorbike. The logistics are quite different for each, and they use different providers depending on situation.

Shipping everything to one location that redistributes would explode in both costs and complexity.

Maybe they will, but this seems to be separate in that if it resolves the physical address from the code during the checkout process like a DNS call, it isn't reliant on actually shipping with Japan post and even if it does, it now has the physical address, so why not use that.

One thing about the long physical address is that it adds a bit of redundancy. Misspelled or wrong name... still arrives. Misspelled street or city... might still arrive. I'm guessing 1 number off on that code and it's wrong. For the example in the story, a customer inputs the number, three store makes the call to Japan post and renders the physical address to the customer so they can verify before committing.

Easier to roll out this way would be my guess?

With your approach, the burden is on the post office to update their handling process.

With the implemented approach, nothing changes about the postal process, and the burden of work is shifted to the sender, who must look up the code for the recipient’s current address.

I imagine things would get complicated if private courier companies start getting involved

The address would need to be looked up in some cases due to different delivery costs and time estimates.

Imagine inputting: "IiIIil" but meant to input "IiIIi1"

Oops now my package is going to Joe Blow on the other side of the country.

That’s probably why.

> isn’t it pretty easy for things to go wrong if someone forgets?

What do you imagine going wrong? In my mind, if I had a digital address code, one of the first things I would do after moving would be to update it. Plus, the article alludes to functionality that displays (+ confirms) the physical address anyway…

Since years I have yearned that USPS lets you rent a PO Box. Maybe divide the country in 5 to 10 parts, and allocate a special zip code for these. The po box is nothing but just a forwarding address. You as a user control its final destination in usps.com account. It is like a link shortener.

Somebody sends a letter to that address. Regular mail system forwards it to machines. There, machines stick a yellow or some color strip on it with its actual destination, then it comes to you. You could move and simply update usps.com address.

"isn’t it pretty easy for things to go wrong if someone forgets?"

I believe it would be translate to your actual real address if you order package at ordering process

It is even more complex than that: within a neighborhood you have "chome", then blocks, then buildings. All three levels are numbered chronologically and don't follow any kind of logical order. Oh, and streets don't have names. Honestly, I don't know how people did before modern navigation systems.

So yeah, this system looks like a godsend, I want to try it as soon as possible.

* I don't know if there is a translation for this word.

This won't change. The article starts:

> Japan Post said Monday that it has launched a "digital address" system that links seven-digit combinations of numbers and letters to physical addresses.

Their proposal is useful when one wants to move addresses.

In that context, something like a stable digital address actually makes way more sense

This is pretty much how we do it in Bulgaria as well, with almost all residential apartment buildings having no street address, it's just "City region X, building number Y". Online maps services are almost unusable for some places because they simply do not want to handle any system other than "street name + street number".

But if it follows the person unchanged when they move then it's effectively a person addressing system / a synthetic ID for a person.

One thing that wasn't quite clear to me is whether your code is what e-commerce companies record, or the expanded address.

Hopefully it's the code, because the benefit of this is that if you move, you wouldn't need to update your address with a bajillion different companies, just the post office.

Entering building names can be a bit of a pain. I'm not even sure if it's required - according to Wikipedia it looks like you can just keep adding dashes until you eventually get to room number (e.g. 4-5-10-103) [1]. But a lot of address forms ask for it, so I end up entering it anyway.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_addressing_system

Or just a hop of indirection like DNS that lets your "address" move with you.

Quick question - you wrote "There are few safety checks" - did you mean "There are a few safety checks"? I'm trying to figure out if this is implemented badly or not.

Sorry to say this is not the same. According to [0], the eircode is tied to the address, which Japan has already implemented a 7 digit postal code system. What this new way is trying to do instead is you can get a new digital address, in 7 character alphanumeric character, that uniquely addressed to you. So today you maybe in Tokyo, maybe a year later in Osaka. The postal code of your address changes, but the digital address will still be the same.

[0] https://www.eircode.ie/getting-an-eircode [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_codes_in_Japan

> An Post, don't use the postal code as their primary way to direct mail (as far as I understand) .

I'm not sure how the delivery system works exactly, but I think they use the eircode? Especially in the countryside there often isn't much more than that. At my previous address the street doesn't even have a name; but post addressed to "my name, town, eircode" got delivered.

Also when the eircode was first introduced it really messed up the delivery, which seems to indicate they're using it?

See also this CGP Grey video where he talks about post codes / zip codes in general and mentions Ireland's system. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1K5oDtVAYzk

When you say “web forms use it”, is it built into browsers natively, or Irish-based websites add those fields?

Addresses are one of those things that “what programmers frequently get wrong about X”.

In Okinawa I get music in the morning when kids need to go to school as well as random announcements.

Japan has always been weird like that - people are generally quiet and respectful of others, but when it comes to trucks driving around blaring out political speeches, or a "pay to take your large trash" van playing music while driving around to advertise its presence, all bets are off.

Those can be anything from daily announcements telling kids to get home before dark, testing the emergency announcement system, reminding people about today's festival, or asking people to be on the look-out for 89-year-old Takahashi-san who was last seen at the vegetable stand earlier this morning.

That thing is an air raid siren. It's broadcast from city or town offices, and everyone believes it's for disaster mitigation. Sure, but they run complete human in loop system readiness tests each day every day. You don't need that level of assured reliability for those community announcements.

These systems are also there in case of earthquake or tsunami, where people have very short times to act before disaster strikes.

I was cycling around the Izu Peninsula earlier this year and one morning was woken up at 6am by the local ojisan on the PA system.

He wanted to tell everyone that tonight on TV there's an episode of a show with a scene filmed at the local beach. 6am!

Where I am there's now only some music at 17:00, ideally that should announce that it's time to leave work and go home, ffs.. but as this is Japan, it doesn't seem to serve a purpose - people don't go home. That music used to be a siren until a few years ago. I like the melody better.

We do get the aforementioned trucks driving around all day announcing loudly that they'll take your trash, for payment.. but it's very rare now. And the pole sellers seem to have disappeared entirely. I could use a new pole though.. for drying clothes. There has fortunately never been any political speech trucks around here. The town is too small I assume.

I once tested the UK system like that by sending an envelope to myself with just house number and postcode. It worked perfectly, yet convention remains to laboriously write redundant information every time.

That's not the same, the system Japan is launching is a code for your address that doesn't change even if you move. It's not a direct mapping to a physical address, it's a DB where you can change which code points to what address.

Anyway, Japan has about 50 prefectures, I don't think any one of them being bigger than the Netherlands (maybe Hokkaido) so they could have a similar system by adding 2 digits at the beginning of the code.

Theoretically, you can just print a DPBC and a name on a USPS delivered mail, and it’ll get delivered. The DPBC has the ZIP+4, and delivery point encoded. The delivery point is the actual mailbox used (some addresses have multiple delivery points, such as apartments).

If it were me, I would design it more this way after thinking about it a bit:

  1. Japan Post lets you register your address to your Japan Post Account.
  2. No static short code is created for your address.
  3. Japan Post provides an API (like OAuth) for allowing you to persistently share your address location with a third party, say Rakuten, or Kuroneko Takkyubin, or something.
  4. Once you've linked it to those services, they can use this API to get your address at any point in time.
  5. You can unlink services whenever you want to revoke access, without changing any code.
  6. No way to request an address for a Japan Post account without permission granted.
  7. To handle cases like taxis, Japan Post can work with providers like GO Taxi, S.Ride, DiDi, etc. to do an authenticated one-time address share via NFC using the Japan Post App with the digital consoles already present in almost all taxis in major cities (no help for old taxis in the inaka, but that's a tradeoff).
     a. or alternatively, persistently link your GO Taxi, S.Ride, etc. accounts to Japan Post for the same purpose.
     b. and also potentially allowing to do such a key exchange with NFCs on smartphones or a standalone device, but probably taxi operators wouldn't be motivated enough to actually do that.

I just tried it and if you suspect it leaked you can delete it immediately and get a new one in 10mn

"1a. is the primary concern for me, and while I can disassociate my identity from a digital address, that would defeat the purpose of using digital addresses"

Yeah but you would still have better option than not being able to do that I think this is just move the security debt elsewhere which is bad/good it depends on theirs ends

If it was modernized a little, I think I would enjoy needing to tap a RFID hanko to my phone to sign for digital delivery.

I've never had to do that. Hand signature or nothing at all.

I wish we had those hanko. Signing off on any parcel is complete bullshit at the moment. Most delivery drivers neglect to ask for one (or that code you are supposed to give them for some delivery services), and when they do, you just make some arbitrary squiggle on their handheld device — it's not like you can actually do a faithful reproduction of your signature on those, even in 2025, and I certainly can't using my finger instead of a pencil or pen.

Yesterday a courier brought a pallet with my new drill press costing over €500. Signature required, but when I asked he told me not to worry, there was no need…

Nope. Signature works everytime. Don't spread myths.

Probably print a receipt using a fax machine hooked to a pc-engine.

Now let's see who outside Japan actually picks it up next. Feels like a good fit for places with high renter populations