This is kind of neat for finding appartments / houses:

http://housingmaps.com/

Here, one can enter a city name, buy or rent, and price, and it will show you where the available ones are located.

I’m not sure whether to be alarmed or what, but when I find my neighborhood, a few businesses are noted by name, INCLUDING MY NAME on my house!!!

What’s going on here?! I really don’t think I like the idea that these maps put my name on it for everyone to see. So much for staying under the radar in Japan, eh? No one else, like no Japanese people in the whole neighborhood are so lucky. Only my house has this label; all the others with labels are businesses or govt bldgs. Where does Google get this info from, anyway? I’d really like them to remove the name & dot they’ve put on my house, considering too that the house is not even in my name, so once I leave, this info stays I guess. Grrr…

So Luis, does your name appear on your house? Could it because I’m a foreigner, part of the Japanese govt’s new increased obsession of watching foreigners? OK… I checked a bunch of other non-Japanese friends’ addresses and no one else has their name indicated like mine.

Could it be tailored to the user, perhaps, so that Google Maps knows it’s me who’s inquiring, perhaps by IP address? I’m just guessing here but it seems somewhat disconcerting that they’ve plastered my name there, more so if the whole world can see it.

Or am I worrying about nothing?

Ron:

Sorry it took me a while to get back to you on this. I tried to google my specific address and no name appeared. Either by looking for the general neighborhood or my specific apartment, the result is the same. So it’s definitely not a gaijin thing. I believe I am listed in the phone book, so that wouldn’t be the source. The only thing I can imagine is that you are registered with Google in some way that puts you and your address into their system.

They should not be able to identify your identity from your IP address; the IP address they get is determined by your ISP (unless you have a very unusual, specific hookup), and they should not be able to detect more than that as far as your identity goes.

Have you tried the same search from a machine at a different IP address? I’ve got your email address from posts about a year and a half ago, if you’d like, I could email you so you could return reply with your neighborhood and I could check it out, see if it appears on my connection.

Another thing to do would be to google yourslef, using your name and the name of the neighborhood you live in, see what comes up. That might tell you if you’re listed somewhere you hadn’t known about. From what I can tell, the Google Maps link into the Google search engine–if someone’s address is in Google’s directory, then it can appear on the map. If it makes you feel any better, I did a Maps search of your full name, and nothing came up.

Hi there,

Any suggestions for how to enter Japanses addresses into google maps with romanji? I’m coming up short.

Thanks.