North Korea changes time zone to combat ‘wicked Japanese imperialists’

According to state news agency KCNA, North Korea will set its clock back by 30 minutes to “Pyongyang time” on August 15.

Its current standard time, 9 hours ahead of GMT, is the same as South Korea and Japan, and was established during Japan’s colonial rule of the country.

North Korea said the time change, approved on Wednesday by its rubber-stamp parliament, 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.

Hence, the decision to change the time zones has been done to honour the late president, who is supposed to have “crushed the brigandish Japanese imperialists…and liberated Korea”.

South Korea says the time difference could cause some logistical issues, such as the running of their joint industrial park in the city of Kaesong.

There is no worldwide body that regulate one country’s time zone, it is just excepted that way in the world.

The ministry added that in the long-run, it could negatively affect inter-Korean integration, standard consolidation and efforts to recover the homogeneity of the two Koreas.

According to Asia Times, the GMT +08:30 time zone was North Korea’s time zone before Japan annexed the country over seven decades ago.

In Indiana, between 1970 and 2006, the counties in the Eastern time zone did not observe DST while those in the Central time zone did.

North Korea is its own world in many ways.

North Korea, similarly, have been prolific with goals in seven of their nine worldwide outings this year, albeit being held in their 2-0 loss to China on Wednesday.

“With the new time zone, Kim Jong-un is reasserting his code words of self-reliance and national dignity to his people”, Chang Yong-seok, a North Korea expert at the Institute for Peace and Unification Studies at Seoul National University, explained to The New York Times.

North and South Korea split into two sovereign countries – the north socialist, the south capitalist – following their 1945 liberation from the Japanese. Samoa changed their zone in 2011, jumping across the global dateline to improve ties with Australia.