North Korea Has Its Own Time Zone Now

The clocks are to be turned back 30 minutes, which will put the standard time in North Korea at GMT+8:30, 30 minutes behind both South Korea and Japan, which are at GMT+9:00.

North Korea’s megalomaniac leader Kim Jong-Un has ordered the nation to take on a new time zone, in order to mark its liberation from Japan at the end of the Second World War. After taking power in 1949, the Communist Party abolished all except “Beijing time” (GMT +8) to simplify governance and to bring cohesion to the diverse nation.

The dictator in North Korean has decided to make his country’s own time zone.

South Korea will continue to use its current time that it says it shares with Japan because it’s “more practical and conforms to global practice”.

There is no worldwide body that approves a country’s change of time zone as countries decide for themselves.

The establishment of “Pyongyang time” is meant to “root out the legacy of the Japanese colonial period”, the North’s official Korean Central News Agency reported Friday. A shop in South Korea’s capital specialising in goods made in the North has run almost US$140,000 (RM549,000) through its tills in just three months of business, helping dispel the notion that products from the impoverished state are shoddy and undesirable.

And North Korea is not the only country that has created its own unique time zone.

The giant country spans a massive 11 time zones on a map although only adheres to nine weirdly.

Korea first adopted a Western-style standardize time zone in 1908.

South Korea’s Ministry of Unification spokesperson Chung Joon-hee, however, said that South Korea’s standard time is based on practicality and does not follow the Japanese. A decree by colonial Japan in 1912 moved the time line to where Korea Standard Time is now set, 135 degrees east longitude.