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Pacific News Minute: N. Korea Moves 30 Minutes Back in Time

Moyan Brenn / Flickr
Moyan Brenn / Flickr

If you're planning to visit Pyongyang this weekend, remember to set your watch back an extra thirty minutes. In an effort to expunge a vestige of Japanese Colonization, North Korea has created its own time zone, as of Saturday, which marks 70 years since Japan's occupation of Korea ended at the end of the Second World War. More from Neal Conan in the latest Pacific News Minute.

You might think that the UN or some other international organization runs the global clock, but every country can shift time on its own. In 1884, the International Meridian Conference divided the world into 24 time zones. The clock begins at Longitude 0, which runs through Britain's Royal Observatory in Greenwich, and that puts the international dateline at 180 degrees, pretty much right down the middle of the Pacific. The dateline zigs through the Bering Strait to put all of Russia on one side, zags to include all of the Aleutians on the other and there are adjustments for the northwestern islands of Hawaii and for Kiribati, which used to straddle the dateline. Their change created a one-time tourist boom on what became the first lands to celebrate the new millennium.

And North Korea isn't the first country to shift a half hour. The late Hugo Chavez moved Venezuela back thirty minutes in 2007 in order to have, quote," a more fair distribution of the sunrise." Last Friday, North Korea's Central News Agency said its purpose was political; "The Wicked Japanese colonists deprived Korea of even its standard time."

The half hour change accords to the pre-colonial clock. But many on Twitter were quick to note that, in North Korea, time will march backward. North Korea, by the way, also uses its own calendar, which begins with the birth of its founder Kim Il Sung. So if you're headed to Pyongyang, set your watch back nineteen hundred ninety eight years. Welcome to the year 104.

Over 36 years with National Public Radio, Neal Conan worked as a correspondent based in New York, Washington, and London; covered wars in the Middle East and Northern Ireland; Olympic Games in Lake Placid and Sarajevo; and a presidential impeachment. He served, at various times, as editor, producer, and executive producer of All Things Considered and may be best known as the long-time host of Talk of the Nation. Now a macadamia nut farmer on Hawaiʻi Island, his "Pacific News Minute" can be heard on HPR Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays.
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