North Korea to change time zone

For more than a century, North Korea has followed Japan’s time zone, which set the local time nine hours ahead of Greenwich Mean Time.

It has been reported that North Korea’s state news agency, Korea Central News Agency (KCNA), announced Friday that the nation will no longer adhere to the time zone connected with its imperialized roots. South Korea briefly returned to its precolonial time zone in 1954 before embracing Japan’s standard in 1961, citing diplomatic benefits.

No word yet on whether Ireland will get its own time zone, which will be “two secs” behind GMT but will actually vary from anything as little as two actual seconds to ten-ish minutes, give or take the traffic.

Predecessors of the country’s young leader Kim Jong-un are not known to have considered a time change, according to Adam Cathcart, a specialist in North Korea and Chinese affairs at Leeds University in the United Kingdom.

In this September 1, 2014, photo, a clock is visible on top of a train station in Pyongyang, North Korea. It returns the socialist country to the time setting it had before colonization.

Pyongyang time, the DPRK standard time, will be fixed at 127 degrees 30 minutes east longitude, 30 minutes later than the present time.

While North Korea’s grandiose rhetoric makes the decision sound blustery, it is something that its more level-headed neighbor South Korea has pondered over the years.

South Korean Unification Ministry spokesman Jeong Joon-hee said Friday that the change could cause some problems.

The impetus for the change, like most things the North Korean government does, is a long-held grudge.

Like so much in North Korea, it could be a scene from “The Interview”. Instead of counting from the birth of Christ, the country counts from the birth of Kim Illinois Sung.

As for whether South Korea could also move back in time, Jeong emphasized the daylight savings benefits as things are.

He called it “a shame” that the country was using the same time zone as Japan at a time they were locked in a territorial spat over a set of islets controlled by South Korea.