From: Hideyuki Suzuki [SMTP:hideyuki@sat.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp] Sent: Monday, November 09, 1998 6:50 AM I also examined other data concerning Japan in tzdata1998i. The patch at the bottom of this mail fixes the following points. - Only one timezone JST is used everywhere in Japan. Is this true even for the Japanese possessions that are very close to Taiwan? Our main source (Shanks) says that they use Chinese time. This does seem a bit odd to me, since Shanks also writes that during World War II whenever Japan occupied a territory, they set its clocks to Tokyo time. From: Hideyuki Suzuki [SMTP:hideyuki@sat.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp] Sent: Saturday, November 07, 1998 11:54 AM only JST (+0900) is used everywhere in Japan including Ishigaki island. Can you please forward a reference for this? This will be useful when correcting the tables. In particular, is this a recent change, or has Ishigaki always used JST? The situation in Japan is a bit tricky. E.g. my guess is that Macarthur insisted on Japan using DST from 1948-1951, but Japanese birth records were always recorded in standard time regardless of Macarthur's edict, which is why Shanks omits DST for Tokyo during that time. Probably the right thing to do is to uncomment those parts of the rules, but I would like confirmation of my guess first.
Asia/Ishigaki - uncomment it, since it seems to be right
I don't know whether the zone was added at this time, but I suspect that it was added because of an ambiguous reason. The reason that I finally added it at that time was that a new edition of Shanks came out, with that data in it again, and nobody had ever commented about it while the rule was commented-out. I'd much rather remove it if it's bogus. Thanks for your other info; I'll use it in my next proposed patch.