720 Milliliters and Four Gō: The Edo-Period Standard on Modern Sake Bottles

On shelves across Bangkok, sake and wine often sit side by side. Wine commonly comes in 750 ml bottles, while sake typically comes in 720 ml or 1.8-liter bottles. The 30 ml difference between the wine and sake bottles seems slight, yet 720 ml remains a curiously specific number in the metric world.

The answer lies in history. According to a guide to units updated in September 2026 by a Japanese drinks information site, one gō, a traditional Japanese measure of volume, is about 180 ml. A 720 ml bottle corresponds to four gō, and a 1.8-liter bottle to ten. This proportion is why the former is known as a yongō-bin (“four-gō bottle”) and the latter as an isshō-bin (“one-shō bottle”). Though metric labels rule today, the names of these bottles keep the old unit alive.

Gō and Shō: Measuring Volume Through Time

The gō belongs to shakkanhō, Japan’s traditional system of weights and measures, in which the shaku was used for length and the kan for weight. Its units of volume operate in steps of ten: ten gō make one shō (about 1.8 liters), ten shō make one to (about 18 liters), and ten to make one koku (about 180 liters).

When the metric system took effect in Japan in 1959, the use of shakkanhō units in trade and in the certification of measurements was, in principle, prohibited. Yet the bottles are still called yongō-bin and isshō-bin, while their labels state 720 ml and 1.8 L.

1669: The Year the Shō Became a Standard

When did today’s shō become a nationwide standard? Rice and sake were traditionally measured with vessels called masu, most of them square wooden boxes. Between the 14th and 16th centuries, the capacity of a masu varied from region to region, and measures are said to have ranged from two gō to as many as fourteen. In the 16th century, measures began to converge on a box in which ten gō made one shō, and the Kyō-masu, used in Kyoto, spread to the surrounding region.

The warlord Oda Nobunaga, who drove the unification of Japan, made the Kyō-masu the standard measure within his domain, and another warlord, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, also used it for land surveys and for collecting the rice tax known as nengu. If the capacity of a masu varied, the same one shō could hold a different amount of rice. Around the 1620s, a new type of Kyō-masu appeared, with a somewhat narrower opening and more depth; inside, it measures about 14.8 cm on each side and about 8.2 cm deep. Nakamura Tekisai, a scholar of the Edo period (the early 17th to the late 19th century), explained in his writings that the opening was narrowed to prevent cheating when heaped rice was leveled off with a wooden stick.

Even so, Edo (present-day Tokyo) kept using the older type, and the volume of one shō still differed between Edo and Kyoto. In February 1669, the Tokugawa shogunate, the samurai government that ruled Japan at the time, issued an order to unify the masu and made the new Kyō-masu the common measure for the whole country.

When Japan enacted its Weights and Measures Act in 1891, it defined one shō by the capacity of this very box. Converted to metric, one shō is about 1.8039 liters, almost the same as the 1.8 L shown on today’s isshō-bin. Four gō works out to about 721.6 ml, while the yongō-bin is labeled 720 ml.

Koku: The Feudal Measure of Modern Craft

Beyond the bottles, shakkanhō still shapes how the sake world speaks. In the sake industry, koku is used to express a brewery’s annual production (100 shō, or about 180 liters). According to the same guide, a brewery that makes 100 koku a year produces the equivalent of 10,000 isshō-bin. When a brewery’s annual output is given in koku, this conversion offers a quick sense of its scale.

Historically, koku was also used to measure something other than rice or sake. In the Edo period, the scale and economic strength of the lands held by each daimyō (a regional lord) were expressed in kokudaka, the amount of rice those lands were expected to yield. The famous phrase Kaga Hyakumangoku (“Kaga’s One Million Koku”) refers to the lands ruled by the Maeda family, spanning present-day Ishikawa and Toyama prefectures, whose kokudaka was on the order of one million koku.

On a shelf in Bangkok, a 720 ml bottle of sake stands next to a 750 ml bottle of wine. Trace the standard behind the capacity of that yongō-bin, and you arrive at the narrow-mouthed Kyō-masu that the Tokugawa shogunate made the nation’s common measure in 1669.

This article is intended solely to explore the cultural heritage of Japanese sake and its traditional units of measurement, and does not aim to promote or encourage the consumption of alcohol. / บทความนี้จัดทำขึ้นเพื่อนำเสนอข้อมูลเกี่ยวกับมรดกทางวัฒนธรรมของสาเกญี่ปุ่นและหน่วยวัดแบบดั้งเดิมเท่านั้น มิได้มีเจตนาเพื่อส่งเสริมหรือโฆษณาเครื่องดื่มแอลกอฮอล์ สำหรับผู้มีอายุ 20 ปีขึ้นไป โปรดดื่มอย่างรับผิดชอบ

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