JST to PST

With a 16- or 17-hour lead, Tokyo spends most of its day on a date the Pacific coast has not reached yet. The two places share the same date only from 5:00 PM to midnight Tokyo time in winter, and from 4:00 PM to midnight in summer. Before that, Los Angeles, Seattle and San Francisco are still on yesterday. The gap shrinks to 16 hours on the second Sunday of March, when the West Coast moves to PDT (UTC−7), and returns to 17 on the first Sunday of November.

Japan has no daylight saving time, so all of the change comes from the American side. That is useful when you read Japanese release times: a game update scheduled for 10:00 JST will always arrive at 5:00 PM Pacific the day before in winter and 6:00 PM in summer.

Much of the traffic between these zones comes from the game and electronics industries. Nintendo is based in Kyoto and runs its American business from Redmond, Washington; Sony's PlayStation business is headquartered in San Mateo, California. Global announcements are often timed for a Pacific morning, which lands in the Japanese evening, so both teams can watch live.

Baseball runs the other way. Since Shohei Ohtani joined the Los Angeles Dodgers in 2024, a 7:10 PM home game in Los Angeles is broadcast live in Japan at 11:10 AM the next day, and Japanese viewers check Pacific start times more than ever. For the US East Coast version of the same conversion, see Tokyo to New York.

Office hours barely overlap. The practical window is late afternoon in California and early morning in Japan: 4:00 to 6:00 PM PST is 9:00 to 11:00 AM in Tokyo the next day, and in summer the same Tokyo morning lines up with 5:00 to 7:00 PM PDT.