North Korea resets clock to pre-colonial time zone

North Korea announced Friday it was moving its clocks back 30 minutes to create a new "Pyongyang Time" breaking from a standard imposed by "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 the presidium of the cabinet, the Supreme People's Assembly, 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 wicked Japanese imperialists committed such unpardonable crimes as depriving Korea of even its standard time while mercilessly trampling down its land," the North's official KCNA news agency 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." Analysts said Pyongyang's time shift was aimed at shoring up the official narrative that paints North Korea as the pure, "authentic" Korea and the South as a land polluted by foreign domination. "It has sent a political signal to mark its strong national consciousness and it is also in accordance with its introduction of the Juche Calendar under the Juche Idea [North Korea's 'self-reliance' ideology]," Zhang Liangui, a professor at the Party School of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, told the Global Times on Friday. "The North has always sought to project this image of being more aggressive in wiping out traces of Japanese colonial rule," said Yang Moo-Jin at the University of North Korean Studies in Seoul. "So this falls in line with its claim to be the only legitimate Korean regime on the peninsula, and its dismissal of the South as a 'puppet regime' still sticking to corrupt colonial practices," Yang said. The time shift also matches the 70th anniversary of its liberation, which Zhang described as the perfect time to boost North Korea's national consciousness. "North Korea is trying to break away from the history of suffering." 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. "In the short term, there might be some inconvenience in entering and leaving Kaesong," ministry spokesman Jeong Joon-Hee told reporters. "And in the longer term, there may be some fallout for efforts to unify standards and reduce differences between the two sides," Jeong said. South Korea similarly changed its standard time in 1954 to reflect the break from Japanese rule but reverted to Japan standard time in 1961 due to "massive social and economic costs getting in the way," according to Yonhap News, adding that the potential confusion expected in joint military operations between Seoul and Washington was one of the obstacles, Yonhap added. Jeong said that South Korea's choice of the current time zone is based on practical benefits such as daylight savings, rather than colonial history, Yonhap reported. "South Korea is located about midway between China's westward time zone and Japan's eastward time zone, and countries traditionally opt for eastern ones due to practical reasons," he said. However, Zhang pointed out that the time shift, as an internal affair though also the latest sign of increasing differences between the North and the South, will not affect North Korea's relations with its neighboring countries, including South Korea. "People will feel disorientated to begin with, but it is a solvable technical problem," he said. For those South Koreans opposed to the long-time presence of US forces, it is a charge that strikes close to the bone, and some took to news portals and social networks to praise Pyongyang's move. "This time the North has actually done something right," commented one reader on the country's largest Internet news portal, Naver. "I hope we can do the same and reclaim our own standard time," wrote another. Apart from North Korea, countries including Iran, Afghanistan, India and Myanmar also use half hour time zones.