News Digest

North Korea winds back its clocks to make ‘Pyongyang time’

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 at GMT 8:30, 30 minutes behind South Korea which, like Japan, is at GMT 9:00. North Korea said the time change, approved on Wednesday by its rubber-stamp parliament and announced on Friday, would come into effect from August 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 said.

Standard time in pre-colonial Korea had run at GMT 8:30 but was changed to Japan standard time in 1912. 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.