- published: 02 Feb 2016
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Japan Standard Time or JST (Japanese: 日本標準時 Nihon Hyōjunji or 中央標準時 Chūō Hyōjunji) is the standard timezone of Japan, and is 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 in Western contexts.
Before the Meiji era (1868–1912), each local region had its own timezone in which noon was set to when the sun is exactly at its zenith. As modern transportation like trains were adopted, this practice started to cause confusion. For example, there is a difference of about 5 degrees in terms of longitude between Tokyo and Osaka and because of this, a train that departed from Tokyo would arrive at Osaka 20 minutes ahead of the time in Tokyo. In 1886, Ordinance 51 was issued in response to this problem, which stated:
Ordinance 51 (on the precise calculation of time using the Prime Meridian) - July 13, 1886
According to this, the standard time (標準時, Hyōjunji?) was set 9 hours ahead of GMT (UTC had not been established yet). In the ordinance, the first clause mentions GMT, the second defines east longitude and west longitude and the third says the standard timezone would be in effect from 1888. Coincidentally, the city of Akashi in Hyōgo Prefecture is located exactly on 135 degrees east longitude and subsequently became known as Toki no machi (Town of Time).
Japan i/dʒəˈpæn/ (Japanese: 日本 Nihon or Nippon; formally 日本国 Nippon-koku or Nihon-koku, literally the State of Japan) is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south. The characters that make up Japan's name mean "sun-origin", which is why Japan is sometimes referred to as the "Land of the Rising Sun".
Japan is an archipelago of 6,852 islands. The four largest islands are Honshū, Hokkaidō, Kyūshū and Shikoku, together accounting for ninety-seven percent of Japan's land area. Japan has the world's tenth-largest population, with over 127 million people. The Greater Tokyo Area, which includes the de facto capital city of Tokyo and several surrounding prefectures, is the largest metropolitan area in the world, with over 30 million residents.
Archaeological research indicates that people lived in Japan as early as the Upper Paleolithic period. The first written mention of Japan is in Chinese history texts from the 1st century AD. Influence from other nations followed by long periods of isolation has characterized Japan's history. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, victory in the First Sino-Japanese War, the Russo-Japanese War and World War I allowed Japan to expand its empire during a period of increasing militarism. The Second Sino-Japanese War of 1937 expanded into part of World War II in 1941, which came to an end in 1945 following the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Since adopting its revised constitution in 1947, Japan has maintained a unitary constitutional monarchy with an emperor and an elected parliament called the Diet.
Standard time is the result of synchronizing clocks in different geographical locations within a time zone to the same time rather than using the local meridian as in local mean time or solar time. Historically, this helped in the process of weather forecasting and train travel. The concept became established in the late 19th century. The time so set has come to be defined in terms of offsets from Universal Time. Where daylight saving time is used, the term standard time typically refers to the time without daylight saving time.
The adoption of Standard Time, because of the inseparable correspondence between time and longitude, solidified the concepts of halving the globe into an eastern and western hemisphere, with one Prime Meridian (as well its opposite International Dateline) replacing the various Prime Meridians that were in use.
A standardized time system was first used by British railways on December 11, 1847, when they switched from local mean time to Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). It was also given the name Railway time reflecting the important role the railway companies played in bringing it about. The vast majority of Great Britain's public clocks were being synchronised using GMT by 1855.