Props to the author for putting in the hard yards here. I used to work with a major geocoding service, and Japanese addresses were a nightmare, both in the original Japanese and when translated to English. In many places in Japan (Kyushu, Okinawa and Hokkaido are particularly bad), the kanji readings of names are completely impenetrable even to native Japanese speakers:
A couple of "favorite" exceptions not on Wikipedia:
House numbers are usually of the form 1-2-3. Places with just two numbers are common, they haven't caught up with the "new" law from the 1962 yet.
Numbers are often written without suffixes, but in most places with three numbers the suffixes are 丁目-番-号. In one city - Wakasa in Fukui - the last two are reversed. I have never been able to find any mention of this at all, let alone why it would be the case.
Some cities are laid out in a clock pattern with slices named after animals of the Chinese Zodiac.
Neighborhoods are typically divided into blocks with numbers (or the number is omitted if there's just one block). But as addresses change over time, sometimes just one block goes away, so there are many places where block 1 no longer exists or there are gaps in the numbering.
On Yahoo Answers I once saw a person who was confused after their local post office adamantly told them one of their two or three numbers had a hyphen in it (so it was like 1-(2-3)) because it represented two joined lots, but that shouldn't be possible.
Mail is always complicated... I worked at a mail store in high school in the States and remember shipping some weird stuff.
Hoho, I've got a fun one. My house is TOWN 632-3 but not 丁目 番 号 anything. There is a 6丁目32番3号 in our city which is _not_ my house. This lead one night to me driving across town to pick up a lost friend.
Our house was in a development soon post war which for ages was surrounded by nothing but rice paddies. We've had a couple online shops which assume we're missing portions of our address. Overall though I like havinng only two numbers. Makes me feel like I own a whole town block.
Oh, that sounds awful. I have a C in my address and sometimes it's fine and sometimes it's a whole thing explaining that it's not 4, it's C.
That said, two-number adresses are pretty common, I'm surprised you run into trouble with that. I live near Tokyo Tower, and even in the heart of Tokyo Minato-ku is only 99.XX% three-digit addresses. Azabu Nagasaka and Azabu Mamiana are tiny neighborhoods that are both still two digits (and Mamiana's name is another weird story...).
> It is recognised that Edinburgh has a unique character which also translates into the flat numbering systems used.
> Edinburgh has two main flat numbering systems in operation; the traditional tenement numbering system e.g.
> GF1,1F1 and the modern flat numbering conventions e.g. Flat 1, Flat 2. Where development takes place within
> properties with the traditional tenement numbering, this numbering system will be retained. New development will
> be allocated the modern flat numbering convention.
> Properties in common stairs must be allocated a main street number. Numbers are then allocated internally to each
> flat for example, Flat 1, Flat 2. For the traditional tenement numbering system, flats are allocated numbers in the form
> 1F1, 1F2, etc. 1F1 should be interpreted as 1st Floor, Flat 1.
> The rotation of the internal numbers follows the rotation of the staircase, with the highest number being located at
> the door furthest from the last riser on the stair.
But the post office (by default) uses a simple numbering scheme, which is the de facto standard even though the "legal" address is the one set by the council. Absolute nightmare.
I suspect similar situations arise, on a smaller scale, all over the place. I live in a house (29 Acacia Road) divided into three flats, known as Flat 1 29 Acacia Road, Flat 2 29 Acacia Road, and Flat 3 29 Acacia Road to the council, but known as 29 Acacia Road, 29A Acacia Road, and 29B Acacia Road to the Royal Mail. And as FLAT GND FLR 29 ACACIA ROAD, FLAT 1ST FLR 29 ACACIA ROAD, FLAT 2ND FLR 29 ACACIA ROAD to the Valuation Office Agency. Until very recently, they were known as something else to the Land Registry!
Argh I live in house that's been converted into two flats. One system calls us (to borrow your example) 29 and 29A, another calls us 29A and 29B, and assorted outliers call mine Downstairs, Ground Floor, Grannyflat ..
It must be worse for upstairs, who are simulataneously 29A and 29B. I'm only sometimes 29A but never 29B.
We also have three postcodes, but we're not sure which belongs to who.
Luckily the two flats / six addresses all share the same letterbox.
To add ot that, the "simple" numbering scheme is usually denoted by e.g. "9/8" - Building 9, Flat 8, (which depending on the building layout might be 9 3f2 or 9 2f4). Infuriatingly, many postcode systems will autofill the "9/8" format into an immutable address field, and then reject the address with a forward slash in it...
They don't seem to understand how kanji work in general (kanji are symbols, not phonemes; they're more like numerals or emoji than letters). It's as if the article were saying:
"If 1 is pronounced 'one', why is 11 pronounced 'eleven'? My dictionary doesn't list 'ele' OR 'ven' as a valid pronunciation of 1!"
While jukujikun are really common in names (including place names and person names), they're not specific to names. For instance, 啄木鳥 (kera) meaning "woodpecker" is more kanji than syllables, and 今日 (kyou) meaning "today" is also jukujikun.
Jukujikun need to be learned like any other word (you're not going to be able to read it correctly the first time you see it, but that goes for any other kanji reading you've never seen before), but they would not surprise a native Japanese speaker ("today" is not a rare word in Japanese).
Some of the ghost characters do appear to originate from place names, though that doesn't really have anything to do with the addressing system or any postal authority. Of the ones I checked more closely, like 膤, they tend to refer to things that wouldn't necessarily show in an address, like a hill or something.
https://soranews24.com/2016/12/01/w-t-f-japan-top-5-most-ins...
And then you get to deal with this kind of extra weirdness:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_addressing_system#Spe...