What happens to mail posted in US where the address is not in English
April 28, 2024 7:34 AM Subscribe
What happens to mail posted in US where the address is not in English? Recently I was watching a TV show where a Japanese teenager living in a small US town on the East Coast of the US posted a letter to her mother in Japan into a public street letterbox, and every single part of the address (including the country name) was in Hiragana. Would this letter actually make it to Japan, and if so, how?
In the past I have written addresses in Korean except for the country name (capital letters in English) and the mail has gotten to the recipients just fine. I have a vague memory of taking such a letter to get the proper international postage and the mail clerk accepting it without issue. These days I mostly write it in romanized Korean, though, so I am not sure if things have changed.
posted by spamandkimchi at 8:26 AM on April 28 [2 favorites]
posted by spamandkimchi at 8:26 AM on April 28 [2 favorites]
I have sent mail to Japan where only the word "JAPAN" was in the Latin alphabet. It always arrived without incident.
posted by adamrice at 10:38 AM on April 28 [1 favorite]
posted by adamrice at 10:38 AM on April 28 [1 favorite]
This 2020 Scientific American article has the following to say about mail that can't be processed by the optical-character-recognition machines the USPS uses:
"Despite how accurate the OCR is and how far it’s progressed in the past 50 or 60 years, there’s still a certain percentage of the mail that’s unreadable by the machines. Maybe something is obscuring the address, or the handwriting is particularly bad. In those cases, those letters are still read and reviewed by a human operator. But nowadays much of that is actually done remotely, [at] what’s called a remote encoding center. Mail-sorting equipment all over the country is transmitting images of the mail that it can’t read to this handful of remote encoding centers."
To me, this means the answer to your question is:
- a photo of the mailpiece with the all-Japanese address is sent by the OCR machine to a human operator while the mailpiece spins around the conveyor belt of the OCR machine while being remotely encoded
- the human operator makes a decision about what the address is
- if we assume the presence of a distinctive circular global-rate stamp, indicating that this is not a domestic-destination mailpiece, and if we further assume that while hiragana might not be identifiable as such to every American, many Americans, especially those working at the USPS' "where is this illegible mailpiece going?" office, would be able to identify it as "that looks like Japanese" or "yep, that's the hiragana for Japan!", the operator would key in "JP" for "Japan" as the destination country and the mailpiece is sent on its way
You might enjoy this delightful Tom Scott video on YouTube about the remote encoding center in Salt Lake City; he has a go at sorting the mail himself.
posted by mdonley at 1:01 PM on April 28 [7 favorites]
"Despite how accurate the OCR is and how far it’s progressed in the past 50 or 60 years, there’s still a certain percentage of the mail that’s unreadable by the machines. Maybe something is obscuring the address, or the handwriting is particularly bad. In those cases, those letters are still read and reviewed by a human operator. But nowadays much of that is actually done remotely, [at] what’s called a remote encoding center. Mail-sorting equipment all over the country is transmitting images of the mail that it can’t read to this handful of remote encoding centers."
To me, this means the answer to your question is:
- a photo of the mailpiece with the all-Japanese address is sent by the OCR machine to a human operator while the mailpiece spins around the conveyor belt of the OCR machine while being remotely encoded
- the human operator makes a decision about what the address is
- if we assume the presence of a distinctive circular global-rate stamp, indicating that this is not a domestic-destination mailpiece, and if we further assume that while hiragana might not be identifiable as such to every American, many Americans, especially those working at the USPS' "where is this illegible mailpiece going?" office, would be able to identify it as "that looks like Japanese" or "yep, that's the hiragana for Japan!", the operator would key in "JP" for "Japan" as the destination country and the mailpiece is sent on its way
You might enjoy this delightful Tom Scott video on YouTube about the remote encoding center in Salt Lake City; he has a go at sorting the mail himself.
posted by mdonley at 1:01 PM on April 28 [7 favorites]
USPS’ first directive is to attempt to deliver. As adamrice said, all it really needs is JAPAN written on the last line and correct postage, and it will be sent to another location.
Postal services read addresses backwards, from the bottom line upwards, and makes routing decisions sequentially. This ensures that local decisions are made locally. Your address will be read by four or five people on its way to delivery (ignoring automated mail sorting). This means that only after a local post office on the final leg of your letter’s journey decides that your letter is undeliverable will your letter be returned to sender.
Your local pickup person checks for correct postage (often just by feel) and then tosses your letter into a bin depending on whether it is international or intranational. So if it’s headed to Japan, USPS doesn’t care about what else it says, so long as it’s below the max weight for an international letter per Universal Postal Union standards and has enough postage.
At the intra-national level, your letter is read for the first two or three numbers in the postal code. If you’re mailing something to, let’s say Eastern Massachusetts, then (024XX) is all that matters.
When it arrives at the regional sorting facility, they’ll figure out what to do next.
The regional sorting facility will read the last two digits of the postal code, and check that the city/town matches the postal code. If city and code match, they’ll send it on to the local post office. If not, they’ll put it in a special sort bin, and someone will examine the address and make a best guess as to which local post office your letter should head to.
Once at the local post office, your letter will be prepared for delivery. If errors in addressing appear minor, they may just drop your letter off at an address based on a best guess. If they can’t figure out where it should go, the letter will be returned to sender.
posted by Headfullofair at 2:22 PM on April 28 [2 favorites]
Postal services read addresses backwards, from the bottom line upwards, and makes routing decisions sequentially. This ensures that local decisions are made locally. Your address will be read by four or five people on its way to delivery (ignoring automated mail sorting). This means that only after a local post office on the final leg of your letter’s journey decides that your letter is undeliverable will your letter be returned to sender.
Your local pickup person checks for correct postage (often just by feel) and then tosses your letter into a bin depending on whether it is international or intranational. So if it’s headed to Japan, USPS doesn’t care about what else it says, so long as it’s below the max weight for an international letter per Universal Postal Union standards and has enough postage.
At the intra-national level, your letter is read for the first two or three numbers in the postal code. If you’re mailing something to, let’s say Eastern Massachusetts, then (024XX) is all that matters.
When it arrives at the regional sorting facility, they’ll figure out what to do next.
The regional sorting facility will read the last two digits of the postal code, and check that the city/town matches the postal code. If city and code match, they’ll send it on to the local post office. If not, they’ll put it in a special sort bin, and someone will examine the address and make a best guess as to which local post office your letter should head to.
Once at the local post office, your letter will be prepared for delivery. If errors in addressing appear minor, they may just drop your letter off at an address based on a best guess. If they can’t figure out where it should go, the letter will be returned to sender.
posted by Headfullofair at 2:22 PM on April 28 [2 favorites]
Ok just watched the Tom Scott video and apparently my understanding of US mail is completely outdated!
posted by Headfullofair at 2:30 PM on April 28
posted by Headfullofair at 2:30 PM on April 28
Your next question after the letter makes it to Japan could be, will the letter deliver even if it's written in hiragana? Writing an address just in hiragana instead of using any kanji is a very strange choice. Addresses are mostly place names and that's a bunch of kanji. I have a feeling even if the letter writer was a really young child instead of a high schooler and didn't know any kanji they'd either ask someone to write out the address or copy out the address themselves.
Anyway, Yahoo! Answers is a treasure trove of weird questions and the answer is yes it would make it even if only written in hiragana. Hopefully they don't leave out the postal code.
posted by karasu at 2:50 PM on April 28
Anyway, Yahoo! Answers is a treasure trove of weird questions and the answer is yes it would make it even if only written in hiragana. Hopefully they don't leave out the postal code.
posted by karasu at 2:50 PM on April 28
Another country heard from? In the early 1960s my UK naval father was stationed for a year in pre-independence Singapore and I wrote him a letter addressed to "Commodore H.L. Scientist / Singapore". It arrived eventually but counter-stamped with numerous not-known-here annotations as it went the rounds of fortress Singapore. Postal workers will rise to a challenge.
posted by BobTheScientist at 11:25 PM on April 28 [1 favorite]
posted by BobTheScientist at 11:25 PM on April 28 [1 favorite]
This may be off-topic and an incorrect guess, but if the show was Dead Boy Detectives, the Japanese teenager was Miko, and the small town was Port Townshend, that was all taking place in the Pacific Northwest and not the East Coast. I mention it because the addresses caught my attention too, and the setting for their small town was a bit vague at times.
posted by traveler_ at 12:50 PM on April 29 [2 favorites]
posted by traveler_ at 12:50 PM on April 29 [2 favorites]
Response by poster: This may be off-topic and an incorrect guess, but if the show was Dead Boy Detectives, the Japanese teenager was Miko, and the small town was Port Townshend, that was all taking place in the Pacific Northwest and not the East Coast. I mention it because the addresses caught my attention too, and the setting for their small town was a bit vague at times.
This was indeed the TV show and character that I was talking about! ^_^
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 6:25 PM on April 30
This was indeed the TV show and character that I was talking about! ^_^
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 6:25 PM on April 30
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posted by eschatfische at 7:48 AM on April 28 [3 favorites]