Adapting to new summer hrs

The Yomiuri Shimbun

Some companies have adopted or plan to adopt in-house daylight saving time by moving up employees' working hours--by about an hour in most cases--to cope with expected electricity shortages this summer.

By setting the beginning and end of the workday one hour or so earlier, these companies are trying to decrease electricity consumption at night and disperse power use from peak hours. But the employees subject to the system could have difficulty adjusting as their work hours are different from the rest of society.

Video game giant Konami Corp. on May 16 moved up its working hours by one hour to from 8 a.m. to 4:45 p.m. at six offices where several thousand employees work. The firm will keep the system in place until early October.

A Web designer at Konami said she commutes about an hour each way to the firm's office in the Roppongi district of Minato Ward, Tokyo, from her home in Kanagawa Prefecture. The trains she uses are not as crowded, she said, but she has not been sleeping as much since she now gets up one hour earlier, between 5 a.m. and 6 a.m.

"If I get used to this new rhythm, I think I'll be able to use the time effectively, like by watching a movie in the evening," she said.

Electronics makers including Panasonic Corp. and Sony Corp. are planning to adopt in-house daylight saving time for their offices and factories. Sony Corp. plans to set working hours from 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. at offices in areas served by Tokyo Electric Power Co. from July 1 through Sept. 22.

Beverage maker Ito En Ltd. plans to set its business hours from 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. for about 5,300 workers at offices and factories nationwide. The Tokyo Stock Exchange plans to work from 7:45 a.m. to 3:45 p.m. from July to September.

Aeon Co., a major distribution company, also plans to move up the opening and closing times at some supermarkets by one hour from July to September. Based on trials already started at stores in the Kanto region, the company plans to select certain stores to adopt daylight saving time.

When the secretariat of the Japan Business Federation (Nippon Keidanren) adopted daylight saving time for August 2007, overtime hours decreased by 7.2 percent from the same month a year earlier and power consumption dropped by 6.8 percent.

The introduction of in-house daylight saving times is expected to contribute to meeting the government's summertime power consumption goal--a 15 percent cut from last summer's levels.

However, some believe having different hours from the rest of society will cause inconvenience for employees of companies that adopt daylight saving time. Some Konami employees said day care centers would not accept their children an hour earlier.

It is also possible that employees could be forced to work overtime to suit the schedules of clients that are not adopting daylight saving time.