On August 15, 2015, North Korea set its clocks back 30 minutes.
The date was the 70th anniversary of Korea’s liberation from Japanese colonial rule. The choice of date was not coincidental. The North Korean government announced that the country was correcting a wrong imposed by Japanese imperialism: Japan had moved the Korean peninsula to UTC+9 (Japan Standard Time) during colonial rule, forcing Koreans to synchronize with their colonizers. Pyongyang Time (UTC+8:30) was, officially, a restoration of Korean temporal sovereignty.
The move created a unique timezone. UTC+8:30 has no other major users. North Korea was alone in it: one half-hour behind Japan and South Korea, a gap visible on every clock, every schedule, every conference call between the two Koreas.
The symbolism and the satellite dishes
North Korea’s relationship with time is shaped by its political mythology. The country operates on the Juche calendar, a system established in 1997 that numbers years from the birth year of Kim Il-sung (1912). In the Juche calendar, 2024 is Juche 113.
The Juche calendar runs alongside the Gregorian calendar in official documents but adds a layer of symbolic temporal sovereignty: North Korea does not merely keep its own clock; it runs its own year-count.
The creation of Pyongyang Time fits this pattern perfectly. UTC+8:30 was not just different from Japan’s timezone; it was different from South Korea’s. The Demilitarized Zone separating the two Koreas is 38 degrees North: the same latitude, different countries, and from 2015 to 2018, different times.
The reconciliation reversal
In April 2018, Kim Jong-un announced that North Korea would move its clocks forward 30 minutes, reverting to UTC+9 to match South Korea. The announcement came just before the historic inter-Korean summit at Panmunjom, where Kim Jong-un crossed into South Korea and met with President Moon Jae-in.
The clock change was explicitly framed as a gesture of reconciliation: North Korea would share a timezone with the South, erasing one layer of the division. Kim said that the sight of two clocks showing different times in the meeting room at Panmunjom had made him feel pain.
It was, by any measure, one of the more unusual diplomatic acts of recent decades: adjusting a country’s clocks as part of peace negotiations. The Pyongyang Time experiment lasted exactly two years, 11 months, and 10 days.
UTC+9 and the Seoul-Pyongyang relationship
Both Koreas now run on UTC+9 (Korea Standard Time), the same offset that Japan uses. There is no DST in either North or South Korea.
The irony of returning to Japan’s timezone, after the elaborate 2015 symbolism of rejecting it, was noted internationally. The North Korean state media did not dwell on this irony. The clock change was presented as a positive step toward unification, full stop.
What it’s like inside
The outside world’s information about daily life in North Korea is fragmentary, drawn mostly from defector testimony and satellite imagery. The country has no functioning free press and restricts information flows severely.
What is known: North Korea’s electricity supply is highly unreliable outside Pyongyang. Much of the country experiences regular blackouts. In this context, the precise UTC offset is somewhat academic for much of the population, whose interaction with standardized time is mediated by factory whistles, school bells, and radio broadcasts rather than the digital timekeeping that most of the world takes for granted.
The satellite imagery of North Korea at night is famous: while South Korea and China glow with light, North Korea is almost entirely dark, a geographic shadow.
UTC+9 ticks in the dark.
The IANA entry
Asia/Pyongyang has been through unusual changes for an IANA entry. It moved from UTC+8:30 in August 2015 and back to UTC+9 in May 2018. Timezone database maintainers updated the entry twice within three years. The historical record in the IANA database captures both changes, providing a complete timeline of North Korea’s brief and politically loaded timezone experiment.
