this post was submitted on 09 Sep 2026
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[–] farmgineer@nord.pub 4 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

As a Canadian-American living in Japan.

Height/Distance: metric

Cooking: metric (ml for volume, but I normally translate all recipes into weights and just throw things into a bowl on the scale) for both amounts and temperatures

Weight: metric

Speed: metric (m/s for wind, kph for basically anything else not science-y enough for other units)

Certain products: bicycle tires (maybe frames?), screen sizes, and more I'm forgetting.: inches but not called inches and almost always with the size in mm/cm written next to it. I have never met a Japanese person who knows what an inch actually represents unless they lived in the US or work closely with the US in certain industries (e-commerce is one for unit conversions)

Property sizes: In my own usages, metric (square metres). Dealing with Japanese real estate, home centers, etc: 帖 (jou the counter for tatami mats) and 坪 (tsubo the counter for area).

Consuming:

  • soda, milk, water and whatnot: metric
  • 日本酒 (nihonshu, what most people would call "sake" in the west): x合瓶 (x goubin; where x = 1 -> 180ml, 2 -> 300ml, 4 -> 720ml or so); masu (a box being around 8 shaku -> 144ml); xお猪口 (x ochoku) for x sake cups.
  • other alcohol: I still sometimes will refer to a 750ml liquor bottle as a fifth if I'm not thinking about it

This is ignoring all of the counters Japanese has (一枚 one flat object like a sheet of paper, 一本 one cylnindrical object like a pencil/cigarette/whatever, and dozens more). Bonus: they're not all the same between Japanese and Chinese which feels weird. I don't know about Korean on that part since I think the counters are mostly written in hanguel anyway.