News Digest

North Korea: Why the hermit kingdom has established its own time zone

North Korea has announced that it is winding its clocks back by 30 minutes to create a new “Pyongyang Time” — breaking from a time standard imposed by what it called “wicked Japanese imperialists” more than a century ago. The change will put the standard time in North Korea 30 minutes behind South Korea. North Korea said the time change, approved on Wednesday by its rubber-stamp parliament and announced on Friday, would come into effect from Aug. 15, which this year marks the 70th anniversary of the Korean peninsula’s liberation from Japan’s 1910-45 colonial rule.

The North has always sought to project this image of being more aggressive in wiping out traces of Japanese colonial rule.

Yang Moo-jin, a professor at the University of North Korean Studies

Standard time in precolonial Korea was changed to Japan standard time in 1912. State news agency KCNA said the parliamentary decree reflected “the unshakable faith and will of the service personnel and people on the 70th anniversary of Korea’s liberation.” Seoul’s Unification Ministry, which deals with cross-border affairs, said a different time zone between North and South posed a number of possible challenges, including for operations at the jointly run Kaesong industrial complex that lies just inside North Korea. Analysts said Pyongyang’s time shift was aimed at shoring up the official narrative that paints North Korea as the pure, “authentic” Korea and South Korea as a land polluted by foreign domination.