August 7, 2015 4:46 am
Having spent nearly seven decades refining its unique account of north-east Asian history, North Korea will next week go one step further by carving out its own timezone.
The change — timed to mark the 70th anniversary of Korea’s liberation from Japanese rule — will reverse Japan’s 1912 decision to move the colony’s clocks forward by 30 minutes to bring it in line with Tokyo time.
It said that the country would revert to “Pyongyang time” on August 15, the day in 1945 when its first leader Kim Il Sung “crushed the brigandish Japanese imperialists . . . and liberated Korea”.
The consensus among foreign historians is that Kim was brought to North Korea by occupying Soviet forces more than a month later — something that finds no place in Pyongyang’s national history, which also sidelines contributing factors to Japanese defeat such as the US nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
North Korea’s historical narrative is fundamental to the ideological system that underpins the state, argues the influential author Brian Myers, who writes that its “history books convey the image of a perennial child-nation on the world stage, wanting only to be left in peace yet subjected to endless abuse and contamination from outsiders”.
This distinctive approach to history was also on show last week, when North Korea marked the end of the Korean War. Foreign historians concur that the conflict began with a North Korean attack and ended in stalemate, while Pyongyang maintains that it secured victory against an unprovoked US invasion.
“July 27 will remain forever as the V-Day of heroic Korea that created the myth of invincibility,” said the Minju Joson newspaper last week, calling Seoul and Washington “despicable . . . losers” for failing to admit their defeat.
Daniel Pinkston, an analyst at the International Crisis Group, called North Korea’s timezone change “another way to separate themselves, to be different and independent from everyone else”, noting its drive for exceptional recognition as a nuclear state in spite of having rejected the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
The timezone change follows North Korea’s adoption in 1997 of the “Juche calendar” — named after Kim Il Sung’s signature ideology — which numbers years according to a system that begins with Kim’s birth in 1912.
Wicked Japanese imperialists committed even such unpardonable crimes as depriving Korea of even its standard time while mercilessly trampling down its land– N Korea’s Supreme People’s Assembly
The accompanying condemnation of Japan comes after the stalling of a tentative improvement in North Korea-Japan relations achieved in May last year, when Pyongyang agreed to reopen an investigation into its historic abductions of Japanese civilians, in exchange for the relaxation of Tokyo’s sanctions against it.
Continued resentment of Japan’s 35-year occupation meant “the Agitprop department doesn’t have to do much to whip up anti-Japanese sentiment”, Mr Pinkston said. Japanese rule is remembered bitterly in both North and South Korea for the suppression of Korean culture, as well as human rights abuses such as forced labour and sexual servitude.
South Korea moved its clocks back by 30 minutes in 1954, but the change was reversed seven years later after a coup by the military ruler Park Chung-hee, who would later use Japanese aid to kickstart economic development.