How to Give Directions in Japanese, Not Just Ask

Japanese directions run on landmarks

In many countries a route is a list of street names. In Japan it is a list of things you can see. Streets mostly have no names, and address numbers follow the order in which land was registered rather than the order in which you walk past buildings, so a house number tells you very little about where the next one is.

The practical consequence is that your directions should name objects. A convenience store, a bank, a petrol station, a pedestrian bridge, a large chain restaurant, a traffic light. These are what the other person will look for, and naming two of them in sequence is usually enough for a five-minute walk.

The five verbs that do all the work

Directions need a surprisingly small vocabulary. Five verbs and one adverb will carry nearly any route you need to describe, and learning them properly is a better use of time than memorising a long list of street furniture.

Note the particle pattern: you turn ni a direction, cross o a thing, and something is located ni a place. Getting o and ni right here is most of the grammar you need.

Counting lights, corners and blocks

The single most Japanese thing about giving directions is counting traffic lights. Rather than a distance, people say which light to turn at, and the me suffix turns a count into an ordinal. Futatsu-me no shingō is the second traffic light; mittsu-me no kado is the third corner.

This is also how you avoid the distance problem. Nobody knows what two hundred metres looks like while walking in an unfamiliar area, but everybody can count traffic lights. If you only learn one construction from this article, learn this one.

Distance, time and which side

After the turns, people want to know two things: how long it takes and which side it is on. Give time on foot rather than metres, because it is more useful and easier to say. Aruite go-fun gurai desu covers most short walks.

For the side, migigawa and hidarigawa are the standard words, and migite and hidarite, right hand and left hand, are the natural spoken versions. Adding the side to the end of a route is what stops the person walking past the destination, which is the most common failure of a technically correct set of directions.

A whole route, said out loud

Directions are a sequence, and the sequence has a reliable shape: start point, one or two moves, a landmark, the destination, the side, the time. Practising the shape rather than individual sentences is what lets you produce a route on demand.

Keep each step short. A long sentence with three clauses is harder for a listener under street noise than three short ones, and if you lose the thread halfway through you have to start again. Short steps also let the other person nod between them, which tells you whether to continue or repeat.

Ending with a check is standard and it is where a lot of learners stop too early. Daijōbu desu ka invites the follow-up question that saves the other person ten minutes.

When you do not know

This will be your most common answer, and a bare wakarimasen sounds abrupt in a language where declining is usually softened. The convention is to apologise briefly, say you are not from around here or are not sure, and then offer something: a direction to try, a nearby police box, or a suggestion to ask at the station.

Kōban, the neighbourhood police box, is the standard place to send someone with an address, because officers there have detailed local maps and this is an ordinary part of the job. Pointing someone to one is a genuinely helpful answer rather than a brush-off.

Inside stations, which are their own country

Large Japanese stations are complex enough that directions inside them are a separate skill. The important vocabulary is exits, which are named by compass direction or by landmark, and the words for ticket gates, platforms and floors. Getting somebody to the right exit is usually more than half the problem solved.

The convention is to name the exit first, because a station can be a fifteen-minute walk end to end. Higashi-guchi o dete kudasai, take the east exit, followed by the route from there, is the standard shape and it is what station staff will tell you as well.

Note that ikkai is the ground floor in Japan, so the floor above it is nikai. Saying second floor in English to a Japanese listener causes a predictable off-by-one.