Kilometers to Ri (Japanese) (km to ri)

1 kilometer equals 0.2546296296 ri (Japanese) (rounded).

1 kilometer = 0.2546296296 ri (Japanese)

How to convert kilometers to ri (Japanese)

To convert kilometers to ri (Japanese), multiply the number of kilometers by 0.2546296296. The factor is rounded to 10 significant digits. To go the other way, multiply ri (Japanese) by 3.927272727 (rounded).

ri (Japanese) = kilometers × 0.2546296296

Example: 10 kilometers = 2.546296296 ri (Japanese).

About these units

Kilometer (km)

Metric (SI)Current unit

1,000 meters. The standard unit for road distances in most countries.

A name for 1,000 meters took a while to settle. In 1793 France's National Convention made the metre the sole French unit of length, and the first proposed name for the thousand-metre multiple was millaire. Everyday French usage then leaned on the myriametre, 10,000 meters, well into the 1800s. The Netherlands adopted the kilometre in 1817, under the local name mijl, and made it the only official unit of that size in 1867. In 1935 the CIPM dropped the myria- prefix, which left the kilometre as the standard unit for road-scale distances.

Kilo- is the SI prefix for a thousand, and the kilometre is now the preferred unit for land distances in most of the world, with the United States, the United Kingdom and Liberia among those that still use the mile. One kilometre is about 0.621 mile. The main span of Lisbon's 25 de Abril Bridge, at 1.013 km, gives a sense of the scale. Even its pronunciation has been argued over: in 1970 Australia's Metric Conversion Board made stress on the first syllable official, although Prime Minister Gough Whitlam argued for stress on the second. Military slang in several countries calls it a klick.

1 kilometer = 1,000 meters (exactly).

Sources: Wikipedia: Kilometre; Wikipedia: Metric prefix; BIPM: history of the metre

Ri (Japanese) (ri)

JapaneseTraditional unit (still used in some regions)

36 chō, about 3.927 km. The traditional Japanese 'mile', roughly an hour's walk.

Ri comes from the Chinese li, written with characters said to combine field and earth, hinting at the span of a village. China's li has varied widely, from about 323 meters under the Tang to exactly 500 meters in the modern standard, so a bare reference to a ri is ambiguous without context.

Early Japanese practice used a ri of six cho, around 500 to 600 meters. Later it came to mean the distance a loaded porter could cover on a mountain road in an hour, which gave versions of 36, 40 and 48 cho. The Tokugawa shogunate fixed 36 cho, and the 1891 law adopted that count as 216/55 kilometer, about 3.927 kilometers or 2.44 miles.

Modern distances use kilometers, leaving the ri in proverbs and literature, where it suggests roughly an hour's walk. Because the length changed over time and by region, a distance quoted in ri from an old text should not be converted without knowing which ri was meant.

1 ri (Japanese) = 3,927.272727 meters (approximately).

Sources: Wikipedia: Ri (unit); Wikipedia: Japanese units of measurement; Japanese Wikipedia: Shakkanho (尺貫法)

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