Map services are a dime-a-dozen these days but multilingual services are a little harder to come by. A company called Increment P has just announced that they are developing applications for a nationwide map service which will be available in Japanese, Chinese, Korean and English. The English beta version of MapFan onPage is online now and it looks it might be useful. I scrolled out to look at a map of the whole archipelago and found that it includes details for the island chain off Tokyo, including Niijima and Oshima, as well as the island chain to the west of Okinawa, so it looks to have fairly good coverage. There's a drop-down menu where you can select maps of major metropolitan areas and individual prefectures or else you can search by station name It looks like all the main rail and subway networks are included so, if Increment P combines it with an English language route finder like Jorudan then you'll have a lot of information at your disposal.
If you zoom in to a street map then you'll see that it automatically shows the location of convenience stores, coffee shops, fast food joints, banks, post offices and the like. A more detailed search will turn up the location of major department stores, electrical retailers and shopping malls. The general search function will also turn up hotels, car rental, embassies, police stations, government offices and hospitals. Once you have a map you want, you can click on "Japanese" at the top right and it will open a window with the same location annotated in Japanese which might prove useful in some cases.
You can't, sadly, find a location by typing in an address in romaji. If you know what you are looking for, however, then you can certainly find addresses on the maps. The map above shows the east side of Shinjuku Station and you can see that Kabukicho 2-chome, Shinjuku 2-chome, Shinjuku 3-chome, Shinjuku 5-chome, and Shinjuku 6-chome are all shown. In fact, Kabukicho 1-chome is also there view but not labelled in English in that view (although it is identified in the Japanese map). If you zoom in closer, you will see that individual blocks are numbered and that allows you to identify a specific address provided you know how Japanese addresses work. Since I know that the address of regular forum member Gomi Girl's bar is Kabukicho 1-1-9, I can work out that it must be around here:
The map website also allows you to save the URL of the location you are looking at any time so if you want to zoom out from the map above then follow this link and go where you want.
One other search function available is "Tourist Spots". I haven't checked it very thoroughly but it appears that it mainly turns up the location of theatres, shrines and parks but not galleries or museums which are, nevertheless, detailed on the maps. At the top menu, you can search for "Point of Interest" as well as "Station" but I suspect these might be sponsored links because, if you type in "museum" you'll get details of the Tateshina Teddy Bear Museum but not the National Science Museum in Ueno, Tokyo.
As it stands then, the service looks useful notwithstanding the greater diffusion of navigation systems, GPS handsets and the availability of Google Street View. Increment P say in a press release (Japanese) that they intend to offer applications which will increases overall functionality to match the Japanese service so it looks like getting around Japan in English is only going to get easier over time.
