Japan Time Now

Japan time (UTC/GMT+09:00):

Japan Time

Japan Standard Time abbreviated as JST, is the standard time zone in Japan, 9 hours ahead of UTC (i.e. it is UTC+09:00). There is no daylight saving time, though its introduction has been debated several times. During World War II, it was often called Tokyo Standard Time.

Japan Standard Time is the same as Korean Standard Time, Pyongyang Time (North Korea), Eastern Indonesia Standard Time, East-Timorese Standard Time and Yakutsk Time (Russia).

From 1948 to 1952, Japan observed daylight saving time (DST) between May and September every year. The United States imposed this policy as part of the Allied occupation of Japan. In 1952, three weeks before the occupation ended, the Japanese government, which had been granted increased powers, abolished daylight saving time, and the Allied occupation authorities did not interfere.Since then, DST has never been officially implemented nationwide in Japan.

Starting in the late 1990s, a movement to reinstate DST in Japan gained some popularity, aiming at saving energy and increasing recreational time. The Hokkaido region is particularly in favor of this movement because daylight starts as early as 03:30 (in standard time) there in summer due to its high latitude and its location near the eastern edge of the time zone, with much of the region's solar time actually closer to UTC+10:00. Because of this, the sun sets barely after 19:00 in much of the eastern part of the country (in Tokyo, the latest sunset of the entire year is 19:01, from June 26 to July 1, despite being at 35°41'N latitude). After 2000, a few local governments and commerce departments promoted unmandated hour-earlier work schedule experiments during the summer without officially resetting clocks.

The Council on Economic and Fiscal Policy of the Cabinet Office is expected(written October 2013) to propose that the Japanese government begin studying DST in an attempt to help combat global warming. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzō Abe made a significant effort to introduce daylight saving time, but was ultimately unsuccessful. However, it is not clear that DST would conserve energy in Japan. A 2007 simulation estimated that introducing DST to Japan would increase energy use in Osaka residences by 0.13%, with a 0.02% saving due to lighting more than outweighed by a 0.15% increase due to cooling costs; the simulation did not examine non-residential buildings.