[tz] Japanese Summer time fallback transition in autumn 2020?

[Paul Eggert]

It now appears that Japan won’t mess with the clocks for the 2020 Olympic Games 
after all. After Japan’s ruling party held the first meeting of a study group on 
the topic, a party bigwig Toshiaki Endo told reporters that although he 
personally favored DST on an ongoing basis as “a step toward creating a 
low-carbon society”, that it likely would not happen in 2020, saying “It is 
physically difficult because of technical hurdles and public reluctance.”

Endo’s stated motivation of energy saving is not well-supported by the science. 
In a recent meta-analysis I mentioned earlier that has now been published in a 
refereed journal, the bottom line was, “based on the available previous 
research, the best guess concerning the effect of DST on electricity consumption 
is close to zero.” This conclusion was for a world-wide analysis; the preprint’s 
entry for Japan gives a 95% confidence interval of (-0.666%, 0.933%) with a mean 
of 0.112%, meaning that the energy consumption change due to DST would be so 
close to zero as to be statistically insignificant and if we have to guess, we 
should guess that DST should slightly increase electricity usage in Japan.

Okubo T. ‘Difficult’ daylight saving a no-go for 2020 Tokyo Games. Asahi 
Shimbun. 2018-09-28 13:55 +09. http://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/AJ201809280033.html

Havranek T, Herman D, Irsova Z. Does Daylight Saving Save Electricity? A 
Meta-Analysis. Energy J. 2018;39(2). https://doi.org/10.5547/01956574.39.2.thav 
with preprint at https://meta-analysis.cz/dst/dst.pdf