Tokyo’s highest official is casting doubt on government plans to institute daylight savings time in 2019 and 2020 to help manage the scorching heat during the Summer Olympics.
Tokyo Governor Yuriko Koike said Monday that she was concerned about the expense and disruption of moving clocks forward by two hours during summer months for two years only. Koike told Bloomberg News that she also has heard apprehension expressed about the difficulty of introducing the measure in time for the Tokyo Games.
While the city’s Olympic bid documents cited the region’s relatively “mild” summers, this year’s record high temperatures have sparked concerns about the safety of competitors and spectators in 2020. More than 80,000 people have been sent to the hospital with heat stroke this year, an 82 percent increase from last year. Some 144 have died, many of them elderly.
That has prompted Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s government to consider moving the country’s clocks forward for the next two summers, enabling more outdoor events to take place in the relatively cool morning hours, the Sankei newspaper reported earlier this month. Daylight savings was previously introduced in Japan under the postwar U.S. occupation, but quickly abandoned.
Some 53 percent of Japanese adults opposed instituting daylight savings time, according to a survey released Monday by the ANN news network, compared with 36 percent who approved of the idea.