If you’ve been reading along with this here site, or even just following the regular ol’ news, you already know it’s hotter in Japan this summer than a pancake griddle in Satan’s basement. Since it’s only expected to get hotter, the Abe administration is pushing the idea of adopting daylight savings time (サマータイム, or “summertime” in Japanese parlance) for the entire country ahead of the 2020 Summer Olympics, in order to give athletes a respite from the heat.
Aside: This isn’t the first time Japan has embraced summertime. From 2007 to 2010, the island of Hokkaidou adopted the “summertime” convention. However, Hokkaidou never turned their clocks ahead: they simply asked people to commute to work an hour or two earlier, and leave earlier. As the northernmost clime in Japan, Hokkaidou gets the country’s longest period of sunlight in the summer, and city officials and the Sapporo Chamber of Commerce thought it made sense as a way to save energy. However, the effort died out over the course of three years, particularly as sluggish economic conditions minimized the energy preservation gains.
The Abe admin, by contrast, is proposing making the change official. That means changing the country’s computer systems – an idea that Japan’s Information Technology community doesn’t sound all too thrilled to implement. As reported by Asahi Shinbun, IT pros are skeptical of whether the change can be pulled off successfully ahead of the Olympics, which is less than two years out.
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The IT community’s concerns are three-fold. First, there just isn’t a lot of time for such a major change. A large number of computer systems will be impacted – particularly those at banks that are responsible for calculating interest. A lot of industry vets remember the year 2000 conversion, in which the world had to cleanse mainframe code that assumed a two-digit year, and aren’t too fond about repeating the experience. Others are simply miffed by the opportunity costs caused by what they see as busy work:
もし導入されると、同社が中小企業に提供している人事労務システムを改修しなければならず、問題なく動くかどうかのテストにも膨大な時間が費やされる。
エンジニアの浅越光一さんは「対応に1カ月かかるのか、半年かかるのか。その対応にかける時間があれば、新サービスの開発がどれほどできるかと思うと、もったいない……」とため息をつく。
If introduced, the firms supplying labor managements systems to small and medium sized businesses will have to fix these systems, which will squander a lot of time in order to test that the systems are working without issue.
Engineer Asakoshi Kouichi sighed, “It could take a month, or half a year. When I think of the time it will take to respond, and of the new services we could be developing…it’s a waste.”
Second, Japan’s Diet recently passed a new labor law. While previously professional workers could receive overtime for some of their work, under the new “white collar” portion of the labor law, skilled professionals don’t have to be paid overtime at all. In short, IT workers in Japan may be expected to spend many late nights readying for a transition to summertime – all uncompensated.
But there’s yet a third factor at work here: the New Imperial Year. As discussed previously, Emperor Akihito is stepping down from his throne on April 30th, 2019. Japan uses the Western system for counting year, but it also uses the traditional Imperial system, in which, by convention, a new era begins with the reign of a new Emperor. (This hasn’t always been the case; the practice of pairing era names with Emperors is called 一世一元 (isseiichigen), and was only established in modern Japanese law in 1979.) The current era is Heisei, with 2018 being Heisei 30 (平成30年). On May 1st, a new Imperial name will be announced, and a new era will literally begin in Japan.
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As you probably guessed by now, some computer systems – e.g., the pension and health care systems run by the government, and all the systems that connect to them, such as hospital computer systems – use the Imperial era instead of the Western year. The government has proposed dealing with this by…well, not doing anything, and just pretending that it’s still the Heisei era even after May 1st, 2019 (JP link). This proposal has been roundly jeered by the press and public, who’ve asked the sensible question of why the era should change at all if no one’s going to observe it.
This raises the possibility that IT systems administrators and application developers will be faced with two major changes: Daylight savings time and a new Imperial era.
Will Japan take on these challenges prior to the Emperor’s abdication and the Olympics? And if they do, will summertime stick after all the tourists have gone home?