FW: Asia/Ishigaki?

Paul Eggert eggert at twinsun.com
Tue Nov 10 05:38:44 UTC 1998


   From:	Hideyuki Suzuki [SMTP:hideyuki at sat.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp]
   Sent:	Monday, November 09, 1998 6:50 AM

   I also examined other data concerning Japan in tzdata1998i.
   The patch at the bottom of this mail fixes the following points.

    - Only one timezone JST is used everywhere in Japan.

Is this true even for the Japanese possessions that are very close to
Taiwan?  Our main source (Shanks) says that they use Chinese time.
This does seem a bit odd to me, since Shanks also writes that during
World War II whenever Japan occupied a territory, they set its clocks
to Tokyo time.

   From:	Hideyuki Suzuki [SMTP:hideyuki at sat.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp]
   Sent:	Saturday, November 07, 1998 11:54 AM

   only JST (+0900) is used everywhere in Japan including Ishigaki island.

Can you please forward a reference for this?  This will be useful when
correcting the tables.  In particular, is this a recent change, or has
Ishigaki always used JST?

The situation in Japan is a bit tricky.  E.g. my guess is that
Macarthur insisted on Japan using DST from 1948-1951, but Japanese
birth records were always recorded in standard time regardless of
Macarthur's edict, which is why Shanks omits DST for Tokyo during that
time.  Probably the right thing to do is to uncomment those parts of
the rules, but I would like confirmation of my guess first.

   > Asia/Ishigaki - uncomment it, since it seems to be right

   I don't know whether the zone was added at this time, but I suspect
   that it was added because of an ambiguous reason.

The reason that I finally added it at that time was that a new edition
of Shanks came out, with that data in it again, and nobody had ever
commented about it while the rule was commented-out.  I'd much rather
remove it if it's bogus.

Thanks for your other info; I'll use it in my next proposed patch.



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