My hometown newspaper, The News & Observer, recently published this article detailing some of Japan's attmpts to deal with the looming energy crisis. It was written by Mari Yamaguchi, a member of the Associated Press, and was published on June 6th in English in the United States. The N&O is published in North Carolina.
The article talks about the efforts being made in Tokyo to conserve electricity: some government employees are now working from 7:30am to around 4:15pm (as compared to 8:30am-5:15pm). Interesting to me was the discussion of daylight savings time: how Japan has historically been against it but some people have been making a push to adopt DST so that the day would get an "extra hour" of daylight, thus reducing the amount of time the lights need to be on at night. By shifting the work day an hour forward, the workers are essentially adopting DST without the actual clock changing.
I am interested to see how electricity conservation is going to happen as it continues to get hotter. The elevator going up from Yotsuya station to the street is almost always running now, whereas it was off for the first few weeks I was here, and then was turned on only during rush hour. It seems to me that electricity conservation is not at the forefront of everyone's minds -- for example, I have noticed lots of students taking the elevator up just one or two floors, and there is really no reason that anyone would need to take an elevator down at all. However, the article I read is enlightening because it shows that city workers are making an effort to conserve electricity, so perhaps if more people read articles like this one they will do the same.
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