The island nation that moved the international date line in 1995 so its eastern islands could share the same calendar date was Kiribati.
Kiribati spans a vast area of the central Pacific and historically had communities on different calendar days. The government shifted the date-line boundary around the Phoenix and Line Islands so the country’s inhabited islands would no longer be divided by a full day.
The change helped the Line Islands, including Kiritimati, become among the first inhabited places to enter a new calendar year. The move is often confused with later time-zone changes by Samoa, which shifted across the date line in 2011. Kiribati’s decision was primarily about national coordination and economic opportunities linked to being among the earliest places to reach each new date.