How To: Over the River and past the 7-Eleven

The Design Festa Gallery is an art space tucked away on a back street in one of Tokyo’s most famous neighborhoods. It’s a funky warren of tiny galleries clustered together in a ramshackle building covered with chunks of welded steel pipe, posters, handbills, and brightly colored murals. The street address is 3-20-18 Meiji-Jingumae, but if you give that piece of information to a cab driver or ask a passer-by for directions, you’ll probably just get a puzzled look. In fact, forget the address—it’ll be next to useless in your quest to get from point A to point B.

Here’s why: In Japan, physical addresses are (rather unhelpfully) based on construction dates. The first building to go up on the block is 1, the next building, perhaps farther down the street, is 2, and so on. As a result, adjacent buildings could be numbered 8, 17, and 31. And to cap it off, only the busiest boulevards have street names at all. So while the Design Festa Gallery is located at 3-20-18 Meiji-Jingumae, that’s not a useful street address. Meiji-Jingumae is the official name of a neighborhood, but to make things even more confusing, nobody calls it by that name—the locals call the area Harajuku.

To get where they want to go, the Japanese have developed an alternative address system that’s based entirely on landmarks. That’s why, if you try to plot a Tokyo address using Google Maps Japan, the result might lead you to believe that the city is a jumble of convenience stores and fast-food joints. It’s not that the Japanese are obsessed with junk food; rather, the logos of such shops have become standard map-markers because they’re easy to identify from street level.

The result? Giving directions in Tokyo usually goes something like this: “Follow this road, turn left at the AM-PM, continue past Sunkus and Lawson Station until you see the McDonalds...” Once you begin taking note of your surroundings and use buildings and signage as milestones, navigating Tokyo isn’t nearly as complicated as it appears at first blush.

So here’s how to find Design Festa the Japanese way: From the Chiyoda Line subway, get off at Meiji-Jingumae Station and take the #5 exit. With the Laforet department store on your left and the Gap across the street on your right, start walking along Meiji Street until you reach Takeshita Street, the principal shopping district of Harajuku. Turn right down Takeshita Street, past the KDDI Design Studio, and hang a left when you reach the 2030 hairstyling salon. Continue past the DEPT used-clothing store to the end of the block, and Design Festa Gallery will be on your right. Simple as that.