Please excuse me for posting to this list in English. I am not a Japanese speaker, but have recently been examining the availability of Japanese open data for geocoding addresses. This process has been difficult due to my unfamiliarity with the language and character set. My hope is to share a summary of my work here and receive criticism from experts.
My code can be found here: https://github.com/sbma44/japan_geodata_research My conclusions and the narrative behind them are present in the README.md file, which should display at the bottom of the page when you follow that link. In short: I was surprised to find that Japan Post and MLIT seem to use a shared ID scheme, allowing postal codes to be mapped, many-to-one, to the boundaries of administrative districts offered in a country-wide Shapefile by MLIT. It might be that this is already common knowledge -- if so, I would be glad to know that, too! If not, perhaps this will prove useful to others. I would be particularly glad to hear suggestions from Japanese speakers as to what each column in the postal code CSV should be properly called in English and/or in the existing OSM tagging scheme for Japan; and whether the difference between the "oogaki" and "kogaki" files offered by Japan Post represent a concern. Please do not hesitate to ask questions or point out problems with my analysis. Tom Lee
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