Interactive map of the Japanese address system
Details
- External ID
- 49561280
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- Interactive map of the Japanese address system
- Website domain
- japanmap.fyi
- Launched
- Sept. 4, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 9
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.5422647527910686
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 10, 2026, 5:31 a.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 10, 2026, 5:31 a.m.
Description
I had a hard time understanding the Japanese address system. Parts of addresses have suffixes like fu, shi, ku, chōme, ban and gō. Which suffixes are used varies between regions in a way that seemed random to me. I couldn't find a map of the system with a modern visualization, so I made one. It also shows whether an area has a governor or a mayor. For example Tokyo's wards have mayors and Osaka's don't.You can click around or drop the pin to explore, or write an address in the search bar.
Enrichment
- Theme
- interactive maps and geospatial visualizations
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- —
- Audience
- B2C
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- japanese address system map
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Partial The interactive map UI is standard, but accurately parsing Japanese address components and mapping non-hierarchical, irregular administrative boundaries requires specialized geospatial data wrangling.
What it would actually take: The project requires Next.js, Mapbox GL/MapLibre, and vector tile servers (e.g., PMTiles) hosting Japanese boundary data from sources like the Geospatial Information Authority of Japan (GSI). The hard part is building a parser for the idiosyncratic Japanese addressing scheme (handling chōme, banchi, and gō variances across prefectures) and joining this with polygon boundary geometries. Specialized GIS expertise and deep domain knowledge of Japanese administrative geography are required.
Discussion
3 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: OpenStreetMap (OSM)
Concerns raised: Data coverage varies by country, not available below municipality level in many places, Japanese address system complexity not fully addressed, Global data completeness unclear
Feature requests: Expand mapping to cover full globe, Improve country-specific address data
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 36 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #10 of 37 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 310 days after the earliest competitor.
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- Buc-ees Locations · ph · 2026-09-12 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.36
- I built a map where anyone can rename anything · hn · 2026-02-15 · 7 upvotes · similarity 0.35
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.