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Comment by karaterobot | Hacker News Reader

> Japan Post plans to spend about a decade to promote broad adoption of the new system.

The actual feature doesn't seem mind-blowingly useful to me, in the era where most of my form fields get populated for me automatically anyway. Doesn't seem bad, just I don't see it being a life changing thing. I'd hope it does not work as a way for the Post to learn a little bit about my shopping habits. Probably not. Who knows.

But what I think is cool is a ten-year commitment to any computer-based system, which is sadly rare to see these days.

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As some other comments mentioned, the way addresses are entered in web forms in Japan is not standardized. So autofill just doesn't work, a lot of the time. It may even seem correct, but then this particular site wants the address to be written differently.. half-width vs full-width characters, for example (and it can be way more complicated than that). It's so complicated to even enter your name that my Japanese wife couldn't get it right on a hotel's web form, whatever she tried. With her Japanese PC. Had to book by phone, in the end (and, as we weren't in Japan at the time, that was a costly phone call)

I've had some bad experiences with form autocompletion in the past which resulted in orders being delayed (this would have been a few years ago with 1Password specifically), so I always enter address and payment info manually. I assume plenty of people use autocompletion all the time without issue, and will tell me I'm wrong, but that's just my preference.

So memorizing a 7-digit code to enter address information without error seems like a useful feature to me (though admittedly not mind-blowingly so).

It could also be useful in other contexts such as sharing an address with someone verbally, over LINE, manually entering an address into a GPS, etc. Assuming the system actually catches on and the codes are universally supported in map apps.

It's very useful if you change addresses often.

Do not underestimate the Japanese on this one, they managed to get the MyNumber unified healthcare card adopted in a mere 4 years, that's FAST.

if the servers keep the number and not the rendered address, it would save you ungodly amount of times when you move... (you have to go to the city office, register stuff, can take a few hours, then to the police to change your car license, then bank accounts, takes time too, etc. it's a pain)

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