The Japanese love of technology is astonishing. Every problem can be solved by throwing a little bit of gadgetry it's way.
And so it is with street signs. In Tokyo, there are virtually none, and those you can find are illegible to Gaijin. Instead of doing the cheap and easy thing and putting up signs, the Japanese Government plans to tag every building with an RFID chip. Citizens will carry readers, eventually in cellphones (of course) and can pinpoint their location, or view a map.
In a month long, ¥1billion ($8,350,000) trial in Tokyo's Ginza shopping district, PDAs were given to reporters and tourists. The system has some very slick features already. Exiting a subway, for example, you can check the screen and get a correctly oriented, 3D real time display of the area.
Privacy concerns are zero, as the tags cannot read any data, they simply identify places. The system has already been hacked though. A compatible tag was stuck to a lamp post and pointed users to a porn site.
It looks like this trial is to make it into a full city-wide operation, although it won't come cheap; The estimates come in at many trillions of Yen ($ lots).
Tagging Tokyo's streets with no name [The Guardian]
Picture credit [Heroic Beer- Flickr]
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