That must make driving directions interesting. We can say "go south down Guadalupe St., turn left on 7th Ave." What's the equivalent where the streets have no names? "Go south down the street between blocks 5 and 8 in district 3, turn left when you reach block 4, district 2"?
Here's the directions to get to my house from the train station (I take cabs frequently):
"I live in XXXXX-cho [n.b.: name of neighborhood] #1. It is south of the $SUPERMARKET."
The cabbie then will ask me:
"Left at the Budda or right at the Budda?"
Its left.
[Edit to add: Half of the cabbies in my town of 150,000 can also do it from a building name. Any building name. Imagine if you worked on the same codebase for 30 years -- do you think there would be functions you couldn't find? Now, if you go to Nagoya, I would suggest not relying on that.]
"Here's the directions to get to my house from the train station"
Which constitutes a large part of the answer to how directions are given in Japan: it is almost always relative to the nearest train station. "Go out the South exit, turn right at the Colonel Sanders statue and go two blocks past the Pachinko parlor..."
People use landmarks for direction instead of addresses (since nobody can understand exactly where an address is).
There are also small police stations (koban) everywhere in the city that are glad to help someone looking for direction: they take the map of the nearby district and look with you house correspond to the address.
Of course, now with gps becoming common for taxi drivers you can now tell them directly the address, before they wouldn't have been able to help you if all you had was the address without any landmarks or map on how to get there.
