The new “Pyongyang time” will be half an hour later than the current one, which is shared with South Korea and Japan.
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KCNA said the parliamentary decree reflected “the unshakeable faith and will of the service personnel and people on the 70th anniversary of Korea’s liberation”. The county will boycott the time zone shared with Japan and South Korea by replacing GMT + 9:00 with GMT + 8:30.
North Korea is believed to have developed advanced ballistic missile technologies through a series of test launches, including a 2012 launch that succeeded in putting a satellite into orbit.
The North’s move appears to be aimed at bolstering the leadership of young leader Kim Jong-un with anti-Japanese, nationalistic sentiments, said Yang Moo-jin, a professor at the University of North Korean Studies in Seoul.
The widow of former South Korean President Kim Dae-jung toured an exhibition center and a Buddhist temple in North Korea on Friday, the third day of her rare trip to the isolated country, her aides said.
South Korea is sticking with the Japanese time zone, and its Unification Ministry spokesman told reporters that this will be inconvenient for workers in the Kaesong Industrial Region shared by the still-warring states.
The Korean Peninsula was under Japanese administration between 1910 and 1945.
The change of North Korea’s time will result in a time difference between North and South Korea and will potentially result in complications.
Most world time zones offset Coordinated Universal Time by a whole number of hours.
This was left unchanged in 1945 when the country was liberated from Japan and divided into the Soviet-backed North and the US-supported South.
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The change to what it calls “Pyongyang time” will become effective on August. 15 and return it to the time zone used across the Korean peninsula before Japanese rule.
