It's a decades-old debate in Japan: whether to save energy by turning the clocks ahead an hour in the summer like the United States and Europe.
But this July, 220 companies in Hokkaido stopped talking about it and tried it out. The firms had their 6,000 employees come to work an hour earlier and try to leave early in a monthlong daylight-saving time experiment.
The result? Workers tended to get out of the office while it was still light and spent the extra time shopping or watching a movie -- good news for Hokkaido's troubled economy.