[Tagging] Feature Proposal - RFC - Proposed Japan tagging/Places

[gyotoku810]

Dear all,

I'd like to share the results of recent discussions in the Japanese 
community regarding place=region/borough/hamlet, which is not included 
in the address system.

1. Exclusion of place=borough from the proposal

When we first proposed this idea, we thought that place=borough was "a 
broad place name that spans multiple municipalities," but the tagging ML 
pointed out that  "borough" indicates a part of a municipality and 
"region" is more preferable.

However, since place=region is currently used for the eight regions in 
Japan, such as the Kanto region, it was difficult to use place=region 
for other place names. Therefore, it was considered to use region:type=* 
instead of place=borough to distinguish "broad place names that span 
multiple municipalities".

It was also suggested that, in light of the OSM standard definition, 
borough is associated with an administrative unit and is not suitable 
for a rough designation of an wider area.

Considering these comments, I decided to remove the proposal for 
place=borough from this proposal.

2. Change of proposal for place=hamlet

The OSM Wiki describes place=hamlet as "A smaller rural community, 
typically with fewer than 100-200 inhabitants, and little 
infrastructure.", and the English Wikipedia article Hamlet ( 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamlet_(place) ) has a similar explanation.

The "Koenji, Shibuya Hyakkendana, etc." used as an example in this 
proposal was a local area name for a urban area which is clearly 
different than that. Once I considered excluding place=hamlet from the 
proposal as well as place=borough, but I found that there is a demand 
for the tag to represent a hamlet name.

Therefore, place=hamlet is proposed as a tag for "A hamlet, or a 
locally-used place name as an informal address" not associated with the 
address system. The "locally-used place name" here is not the place name 
as in the previous example "Koenji, Shibuya Hyakkendana, etc.", but a 
place name where a common (maybe historical) name exists in addition to 
the official name and is used as an unofficial address. This is similar 
with a hamlet in its size and that it is not included in the address.

"Koenji, Shibuya Hyakken, etc." may be expressed as "place=region + 
region:type=???" in the future.

3. Announcement

I modified these two points of the proposal, and also added and 
corrected some English translations of the entire proposal. Please let 
me know if you have any comments on these changes.

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposed_Japan_tagging/Places

gyotoku810