Cultural walks focused on maps, navigation & spatial logic. Small groups, max 6. Learn to read Japanese cities the way locals do.
Decoding chome-ban-go on the fly. Why "2-15-1" makes perfect sense once you know the grid. Hands-on: navigate to 3 hidden spots using only address.
¥6,500 · 3 hours
In Japan, the chome (district-block) is the named unit. Streets are the unnamed space between blocks. Your address refers to which block you are in and when your building was constructed.
The go (building number) reflects construction order, not position on a street. Building 1 was built before building 5, even if they sit side by side. The system encodes time, not just space.
Once you learn the grid logic, finding addresses becomes faster than in Western systems. Every block is visually distinct, and neighborhood maps (machi-kuzu) are posted at key intersections.
In 1871, a civil servant named Maejima Hisoka returned from London with an obsession: postal codes. The British system of numbered streets and sequential addresses seemed impossibly rational compared to Tokyo's labyrinth of unnamed alleys and landmark-based directions ('turn left at the willow tree, third house past the tofu shop'). Maejima proposed a radical solution: number everything.
Pick up a map at Tofuku-ji, Daitoku-ji, or any major Kyoto temple complex. Notice something missing? There is no scale bar. No '1:500' notation. No indication that 1 centimeter equals 10 meters. This is not an oversight — it is a fundamental statement about the nature of sacred space.
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