The answer: in Kyoto, do not look for a street address - look for a block and a landmark. Kyoto addresses follow a district plus numbered block system, and many lanes in Gion and Higashiyama are unnamed, so even locals navigate by temples, bridges and intersections. Fix on a specific temple gate or canal bridge near your hotel, walk the lane from there, and use a photo route for the last turns; a blue dot is useless when two machiya facades are identical.
Kyoto's historic districts were laid out for people who already knew the way. Lanes often have no name at all, addresses are given by district plus block, and the machiya townhouses look deliberately alike from the outside. Your hotel can be 80 metres from the bus stop and still invisible.
A Kyoto address is built from a district, a numbered block and sometimes a building name - not from a street name plus number as in Europe. Because the block grid predates modern addressing, numbers do not run along a street in order; adjacent buildings in one lane might be 'block 512' and 'block 519'. If you try to read the address like a European one, you will walk in the wrong direction with confidence.
Plenty of the small lanes in Gion, Miyagawa-cho and Higashiyama genuinely have no name marked at all, or only an old district label. This is why local directions sound like 'go west from the temple gate, then the second lane north of the bridge' - they are relative, not absolute. Copy that logic: pick a fixed, visible anchor near your hotel and describe your route in turns from there.
Useful anchors in Higashiyama: the gates of Kiyomizu-dera and Kodaiji, the Shirakawa canal and its stone bridges, Yasaka Shrine's west gate, and the big intersections of Shijo and Kawabata. In Gion, Hanamikoji and Shirakawa-minami are the lanes that people recognize, so hotels describe themselves relative to them. Write the anchor down before you arrive, not the coordinates.
Machiya houses are built with the same dark timber, the same lattice screens (koshi) and the same noren curtains over low doors. At dusk, with lanterns lit, they look nearly identical - and many small hotels do not display a bright sign at all out of respect for the neighbourhood. The practical consequence: you cannot rely on recognizing 'your building' from the street. You have to recognize the sequence: the corner, the vending machine, the stone post, the step.
1) Get to a major node (Kyoto Station, Gion-Shijo or Higashiyama station, or a bus stop on Shijo). 2) Use a saved Kyoto photo route from that node, which shows one photo per turn - including the vending machine and stone markers you will actually recognize. 3) Keep it offline: lanes are quiet but signal between buildings is weak. 4) Tell your host you are arriving by bus or train, not car - most old-lane machiya hotels are in streets where vehicles cannot stop. If you are comparing costs, our Japan rent comparison shows the city-versus-country picture.