Ri (Japanese) to Yards (ri to yd)

1 ri (Japanese) equals 4,294.917681 yards (rounded).

1 ri (Japanese) = 4,294.917681 yards

How to convert ri (Japanese) to yards

To convert ri (Japanese) to yards, multiply the number of ri (Japanese) by 4,294.917681. The factor is rounded to 10 significant digits. To go the other way, multiply yards by 0.0002328333333 (rounded).

yards = ri (Japanese) × 4,294.917681

Example: 10 ri (Japanese) = 42,949.17681 yards.

About these units

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)

Yard (yd)

US & ImperialCurrent unit

3 feet or 36 inches, exactly 0.9144 meters. Used for sports fields, fabric and short distances in the US and UK.

Yard descends from the Old English gerd or gyrd, meaning a branch, stave or measuring rod. It first appears in the late seventh-century laws of Ine of Wessex, though there it names a tax unit, the yardland. Around 959 to 963 King Edgar ordered that the measure held at Winchester be used throughout his realm, the earliest record of a prototype. A story that Henry I fixed the yard as the distance from his nose to his thumb is later folklore, and the true origin, whether pace, cubit or waist, remains speculative.

Britain defined the Imperial Standard Yard in 1824 as the distance between two marks on a brass rod at 62 degrees Fahrenheit. A fire in 1834 damaged the standard, a replacement was made in 1845, and the Weights and Measures Act 1855 recognized it. The 1959 international agreement then fixed the yard at exactly 0.9144 meter. Today it measures American and Canadian football fields, association football pitches and cricket pitches, appears on UK road signs for short distances, and is still used to sell fabric in the US and UK.

1 yard = 0.9144 meters (exactly).

Sources: Wikipedia: Yard; Wikipedia: Inch; NIST Guide to the SI, Appendix B.8: conversion factors

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