The Address Book: What Street Addresses Reveal About Identity, Race, Wealth, and Power

by Deirdre Mask

The sort of integrated city plan people are used to in places like New York and Paris is not a Japanese concept: such integration, Popham explains, is “a sort of beauty which the Japanese do not look to find.” Instead, they had an “attachment to particular buildings and spaces in the city, taken one at a time, with their particular qualities of composure, style, wit, or charm.” Navigating the city then becomes an entirely different experience. In Tokyo, Barthes wrote fondly, you must “orient yourself not by book, by address, but by walking, by sight, by habit, by experience.” You could only repeat that same journey if you memorized it. To “visit a place for the first time,” he wrote, “is thereby to begin to write it: the address not being written, it must establish its own writing.”