Official postal addresses do not contain street names or numbers. An address in Seoul consists of the city name, a postal code, the gu (district), the dong (neighborhood), and a dong-postal code. It appears that the dong-postal code, just like our 9-digit zip codes, might specify addresses down to the individual building, but this is not helpful to the average person trying to find a home or business.
(Those of you who have seen the address of our apartment here might have noticed that there is no street name or number on it.)
So how do people find their way around? They use landmarks: subway stations, buildings, palaces. "Get off the bus at the police station, walk to the next intersection, turn right, go past the palace, and you'll see it." We tell taxi drivers that we are across from the back gate of Ehwa University. We haven't ordered take-out yet, but if we do, we'll have to give complicated instructions to the delivery guy so that he can find the building.
As you might imagine, this is a source of considerable difficulty for the language learner trying to give or get directions.
It is also a challenge for businesses. Just putting their gu and dong on a business card won't help customers find them. So almost every business card has a sketch map on it. The streets are never labeled, but major landmarks are. Many of those landmarks are themselves businesses, and if they go out of business the maps quickly go out of date.
Here's a sample of restaurant business cards, most from around our neighborhood. You can click on the image to see a larger version. It's actually kind of interesting for us to look at them and see which things in our area are considered to be salient references to the average Seoul resident.
Erma and I have heard that the situation in Tokyo is or was similar. (Can anyone confirm this?) Further, we heard that in the 1980s it was common when ordering take-out food to fax a sketch map over to the restaurant so that they would know where to go to make the delivery.
It's somewhat baffling to me why Koreans don't make use of street addresses. As I've said, the streets have names. Not only that, but as far as I can tell, every single building has a placard on it listing the street name AND the street address.
Here, for example, is a building on the way from our apartment to the Language Institute. Gotta love the name of this cafe.
Right there by the entrance is the address.
It says 38-1 Yeon-Dae Dongmun-Gil "38-1 Yonsei University East Gate Road".
I suppose that for most people, the system as it is works fine. It does seem harder for people unfamiliar with local landmarks (like me) trying to make their way around using street maps.Incidentally, the Lord Sandwich building is architecturally somewhat interesting. Here's another view of it.
I can verify that the situation in Tokyo in 1964 was just as you describe. I clearly remember that when taking a taxi, the driver used the business card to call the shop at the destination in order to find the ascertain the points of significance that would help to indicate the direction. The little maps on the business cards weren't yet done.
ReplyDeleteWe are in the process of changing the system to use the street names and numbers instead of dongs and gus. It is rather difficult task to name all the streets and alleys and to let the residents know the new street names they live on. (I don't know mine.) It will take a long time but not as long as in some other country.
ReplyDeleteThis reminds me, mostly in a "difficult for the language learner" way, of old-school Russian food purchasing. There were still stores like this in Petersburg in 2000. You would go to a counter, determine what kind and how much, say, cheese you wanted, explain it to the woman (almost always female) behind the counter, she would calculate the cost (quite possibly using an abacus) and write up a little slip of paper, which you would then take to the cashier who would take your money and stamp your slip of paper, which you would bring back to the original counter, waiting on line once more, and then finally handing it over, usually with a verbal reminder, to get your purchase. Needless to say, although entertaining from an anthropological standpoint, this was a big disincentive for shopping at these kinds of stores. Also, no one in this process was actually "nice" or "accommodating" the way that taxi drivers and delivery people seem to be in Korea or Japan...
ReplyDeleteWhat Pangea describes for Russia is exactly what shopping in China (for food or anything else) was like back in 1989 when I first went there. The Chinese probably copied the whole system from the Russians. The hardest thing was getting any of the sleepy and sullen workers to pay you the slightest attention. That was Communism at its finest: full employment, lousy service, crappy products.
ReplyDeleteCookhie's comment makes me wonder if the address plates (like the one at Lord Sandwich that I took a picture of) may have only been recently installed here.
The map on the Sokran card (first column, third one down) shows an elevated pedestrian bridge that no longer exists, and was likely removed 3 years ago when they redid the bus lanes.
ReplyDeleteI was pleased to see it on the map, though, because it confirms my memory of a pedestrian bridge from when I was in this area 20 years ago.