Hello, fellow residents. I did a quick search for this issue but didn’t see anything immediately so sorry if it has been addressed before, but here goes.
Rather simple: we moved into a new home nearly two years ago and this house was built on what used to be a large parking lot plot. The developers built three houses on this plot, and so they had to split the plot and register three new addresses. Basically the address went from X-X-8 to X-X-16.
The problem is that this new address, even nearly two years after official registration with the prefecture/city, still does not appear on any local (Japanese) GPS/navigation systems nor on Google Maps. This leads to many annoyances with deliveries for both packages and food deliveries, taxis, and some concerns about whether or not emergency services will be able to find our address if we ever needed them (ambulance/cops/fire/etc.) When family got covid, we could not rely on “place it and leave it” options because I always need to step out and chase down the delivery person.
My question is: is there something I was supposed to do for our address to become publicly available in Japan for these navigation systems?
I actually asked a food delivery guy and he said it would probably only happen once all of the actual car navis are updated for the respective service.
I tried to register on google maps but after a year I have not even heard back about the application.
Anyways, mainly due to the family getting covid, this issue has become more of a large concern recently, so just wanted to check if there was anything I can do to speed the process up of our address becoming searchable. Thanks for your time!
3 comments
> I tried to register on google maps but after a year I have not even heard back about the application.
I did same a few weeks ago, interesting to know that it’s going to take at least a year to get it processed 🙂
In the mean time, why not add your addresses to OpenStreetMaps. I’m sure most services incorporate that data to various degrees, even Google.
Interesting how they renumber in your area, locally they keep the same address as before but append -1, -2, -3, etc, to it, but there is still less total subdivisions in the addresses.
I’d try and inquiry with Zenrin first as it seems many (all?) Navi manufacturers get map data from them, even municipal maps at the library are published by them. With Google you might just have to keep submitting the info in different ways. Took me like 4 tries to get a road you can plainly see in sat layer added to the map layer.