This may be my imagination, but writing my address back home was always a lot faster and easier than writing my Tokyo address. The length could have something to do with the byzantine naming of streets and nearly incomprehensible way of laying out blocks that it requires a system of three numbers (chome-banchi-go) in addition to information on the building, apartment number, city within a city, ward and postal code. One of the reasons I'm pretty sure it's not "just me" thinking my American address was shorter is that when I fill in an on-line address field with an American business, the space in the boxes is always too short for my Japanese one. I have to keep spilling over into the next line and it screws up the proper order of the address. At the very least, it's a lot more characters when translated into roman letters.
I won't miss writing out this huge address as well as American businesses and friends getting it confused and sometimes incorrect.
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