2013年7月24日水曜日

Nameless streets and judicial problems in Japan

Most streets in Japan don't have their name
and this might be causing judicial problems.


Instead of street names,
districts, blocks and buildings (lots) are assigned their numbers
and these numbers are used to give the address.

Then what if you need to point a location on the road?

A description will be as follows:

The road in front of
1-2, Kasumigaseki 2 chome, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo-to

This is basically same with those in judicial documents.


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In fact, the address above faces toward two roads
and fails to specify the single location.

The same thing does happen occasionally
in real judicial documents.

Within a trial, there is little possibility of
misunderstanding among participants
but it is not always sure when someone looks up
precedents like this, I mean, incomplete one.



A similar problem.


The figure above illustrates a real accident case.

According to the decision,
the victim (a pedestrian) was distracted by a truck
and didn't notice a bicycle until just before it hit him at X.

As to the truck, the decision said only that
a truck turned right and stopped on a turnoff.

But there are three turnoffs (painted gradient red) near the site.
Thus you could say the victim's possibility of collision avoidance
might vary drastically depending on which turnoff
the victim was looking at.