Japanese units of measurement
The old measures are common in carpentry and agriculture, with tools such as chisels, spatels, saws, and hammers manufactured in sun and bu sizes.
[2] Customary Japanese units are a local adaption of the traditional Chinese system, which was adopted at a very early date.
[4] The next year, a weights and measurements law codified the Japanese system, taking its fundamental units to be the shaku and kan and deriving the others from them.
[4] Following World War I, the Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce established a Committee for Weights and Measures and Industrial Standards, part of whose remit was to investigate which of Japan's three legal systems should be adopted.
[7] Governmental agencies and the Japanese Weights and Measures Association undertook a gradual course of education and conversion but opposition became vehemently outspoken in the early 1930s.
Nationalists decried the "foreign" system as harmful to Japanese pride, language, and culture, as well as restrictive to international trade.
[7] Following its defeat in World War II, Japan was occupied by America and saw an expanded use of US customary units.
[8] Its first success was the conversion of candy sales in Tokyo department stores from the momme to the gram in September 1956; others followed, with NHK taking the lead in media use.
[11] Since the original fines for noncompliance were around $140 and governmental agencies mostly preferred to wait for voluntary conversion, metric use by December 1959 was estimated at only 85%.
[citation needed] English units continue to be employed in aviation,[12] munitions,[12] and various sports, including golf and baseball.
The chi was originally a span taken from the end of the thumb to the tip of an outstretched middle finger, but which gradually increased in length to about 1⁄3 metre (33 cm), just a few centimetres longer than the size of a foot.
[citation needed] The Japanese ri is now much longer than the Chinese or Korean li, comprising 36 chō, 2160 ken,[15] or 12,960 shaku.
The names of these units also live in the name of the bamboo flute shakuhachi (尺八), literally "shaku eight", which measures one shaku and eight sun, and the Japanese version of the Tom Thumb story, Issun Bōshi (一寸法師), literally "one sun boy", as well as in many Japanese proverbs.
[citation needed] The base unit of Japanese volume is the shō, although the gō now sees more use since it is reckoned as the appropriate size of a serving of rice or sake.
[21] The koku is historically important: since it was reckoned as the amount of rice necessary to feed a person for a single year, it was used to compute agricultural output and official salaries.
[f] It was customarily reckoned as around 4 or 10 momme[15] but, because of its importance as a fundamental unit of the silver and gold bullion used as currency in medieval Japan, it varied over time and location from those notional values.
Photographic prints, however, are usually rounded to the nearest millimetre and screens are not described in terms of inches but "type" (型, gata).
