A good fraction of my product orders come from people in Japan. That’s great – I’m happy that the things I’ve designed appeal to people all over the world. What isn’t great is the way the US Post Office treats Japanese shipping addresses. It turns what should be a simple shipping process into a complicated mess.

When someone makes an order for BMOW items, I receive an email with the order details and the shipping address. For a buyer in Japan, the shipping address often looks something like this:

〒904-2026
沖縄県 宜野湾市
末長1540-1
Japan
森澤 政行

Except for the word “Japan”, I have no idea what that says. This example is a mash-up of pieces from several different Japanese orders, to avoid posting anyone’s real address publicly. If the pieces combine into something non-sensical, that’s my fault.

Ideally, I shouldn’t need to be able to read that address. The US Post Office should be able to take the address, send the package to a central post office in Japan, where the Japanese post office will read the rest of the address lines and forward the package on to its final destination.

Unfortunately it’s not that simple. When purchasing electronic postage from the US Post Office, the address may only contain the 26 Roman alphabet letters A through Z, the 10 digits 0 through 9, and a handful of punctuation marks. No letters with accents (no way José), and certainly no kanji, kana, or other non-Roman characters. So the entire address must be translated to romaji, a way of writing Japanese using the Roman alphabet that looks something like this:

Momochi-hama Sawara-ku
Hijirimaru, Nomuki

I don’t understand exactly how this process works, but I think the Japanese is spelled out phonetically using a standard set of Roman alphabet syllables like “ka”, “no”, and “ma”. I can attempt to convert to romaji myself, by typing the address into Google translate, but that risks a translation error sending an expensive package off to the wrong destination. Or I can email the buyer and request a romaji version of their address – if they speak English and can understand my request. When I’ve tried requesting a romaji address in the past, I only got a reply about half the time.

Eventually through some method, I’ll end up with a complete romaji address that looks something like this:

〒174-0014
Tokyo Nerima
4-6-6-302
Syakujii-machi
Japan
Hattori Ito

The US Post office still won’t accept this. It’s got that 〒 character, which indicates a postal code. That’s not a Roman alphabetic letter, so I have to delete it. Then there’s some text on the last line, after the country name. USPS won’t accept this either, because the country name must appear alone on the last line. In this example I can infer that “Hattori Ito” is the recipient’s name, but sometimes it’s not obvious to me what’s a name and what’s part of the address.

Finally, the individual address lines must be reordered. To purchase electronic postage from the USPS, the address must be formatted line by line, with each line identified as the recipient’s name, street address, city name, postal code, etc. Japanese addresses appear to be formatted “backwards” from the method I’m accustomed to, with the postal code first, then city, then prefecture and/or street address. At least I think that’s right. You can imagine how somebody who knows little of Japanese geography might be uncertain about the meaning of each address line.

Ultimately I end up with a shippable address like:

Hattori Ito
Syakujii-machi
4-6-6-302
Tokyo Nerima
174-0014
Japan

I’ve never yet lost a package shipped to Japan, but I wonder just how mangled and confused this address looks to the Japanese. I also don’t know how widespread the reading of romaji is in Japan. Can most people read that address without trouble? If I imagine a similarly jumbled address shipped to me in the United States, with half the English words spelled out phonetically in the Cyrillic alphabet or something, and all the lines shuffled about seemingly at random, I doubt the package would be delivered:

Калифорния
94002
Хиллман проспект 1930
Красивые горы
Steve Chamberlin
United States