Three Timezones in 108 Years
The Korean Peninsula has used three different timezone standards in the 20th and 21st centuries, each change tied directly to a political upheaval. Understanding the Pyongyang Time story requires understanding all three.
Independent Korea
Colonial era → Liberation → Reunification gesture
Kim Jong-un's political timezone
The Japanese Colonial Timezone
Before Japan annexed Korea in 1910, the Korean Empire observed its own standard time of UTC+8:30 — a half-hour offset that had been established in 1908 to reflect Korea's geographic position between the UTC+8 and UTC+9 bands. Korea sits at roughly 127–129°E longitude, which corresponds naturally to a time between UTC+8:27 and UTC+8:36. The 1908 standard was geographically honest.
Japan's colonial government changed this immediately upon annexation. In 1912, Korea was placed on Japan Standard Time (UTC+9), aligning the colony with Tokyo. The practical argument was administrative efficiency — a Korea on the same clock as Japan was easier to govern. The symbolic argument was more blunt: Korea's time, like Korea itself, now belonged to Japan.
When Japan was defeated in 1945 and Korea was liberated, the newly divided peninsula retained UTC+9. The South went on to use it uninterruptedly. The North, under Soviet and then Kim family rule, also used UTC+9 for decades — until 2015, when that changed dramatically.
August 2015: The Birth of Pyongyang Time
On August 15, 2015 — the 70th anniversary of Korea's liberation from Japanese colonial rule — North Korea's state broadcaster, Korean Central Television, announced that the country would roll its clocks back 30 minutes at midnight. The new timezone, Pyongyang Standard Time (PYT, UTC+8:30), was declared a restoration of the original pre-colonial Korean time.
The official statement from the Korean Central News Agency was explicit: Japan had "wantonly" changed Korean time during the occupation, and the restoration of Pyongyang Time was "the measure taken by the DPRK to prevent the Japanese imperialists' vicious moves."
The timing was carefully chosen. The 70th liberation anniversary was a major propaganda event in North Korea — Kim Jong-un delivered a major speech, military parades were held in Pyongyang, and the clock change was framed as a final settling of colonial accounts. The fact that UTC+8:30 matched no neighbouring country — neither China (UTC+8), Japan (UTC+9), nor South Korea (UTC+9) — was, from the North Korean perspective, the point. Distinctness was the message.
"The wicked Japanese imperialists committed such unpardonable crimes as depriving Korea of even its standard time." — Korean Central News Agency, August 2015
Three Years of the Half-Hour Gap
From August 2015 to May 2018, the Korean Peninsula was split across two timezones. When meetings between North and South Korean officials took place — rare and carefully staged affairs at Panmunjom in the Demilitarized Zone — participants on either side of the meeting room were technically 30 minutes apart in their own countries' official times.
The practical impact within North Korea was minimal — the country is almost entirely isolated from global commerce and communication, so timezone misalignment with neighbours had limited day-to-day effect. But symbolically, the half-hour gap served its purpose: it was a daily reminder, for anyone paying attention, that North Korea considered itself to stand outside and apart from the Japanese-influenced order of its neighbours.
South Korea, notably, did not follow. Seoul remained on UTC+9. For the first time since 1908, the two Koreas ran their clocks at different times — a division that went beyond the political and military into the fundamental measurement of every day.
May 2018: The Clock as Peace Gesture
On April 27, 2018, Kim Jong-un crossed the Military Demarcation Line at Panmunjom and shook hands with South Korean President Moon Jae-in — the first time a North Korean leader had set foot in South Korea. The summit was a historic moment of diplomatic breakthrough after years of escalating tension, and it produced the Panmunjom Declaration committing both sides to work toward peace and denuclearization.
During or shortly after the summit, according to reporting from South Korean officials, Kim looked at the clocks on the walls of the South Korean meeting rooms — set to UTC+9 — and made a remark that would quickly become famous: the sight of the two Koreas showing different times was, he said, "heartbreaking."
Days later, on May 5, 2018, North Korea advanced its clocks by 30 minutes, returning to UTC+9. The Korean peninsula was, for the first time in three years, reunited in time if not in politics. Pyongyang Standard Time had lasted exactly two years, eight months, and twenty days.
What It Means
The Pyongyang Time episode is the most compressed, most explicitly political timezone story in modern history. Most countries' timezone decisions are made for geographic, economic, or administrative reasons, with political motives present but secondary. North Korea's 2015 decision was purely political — a deliberate act of national symbolism dressed in the language of solar time.
What makes it remarkable is the reversal. Authoritarian states almost never publicly undo symbolic decisions — doing so implies the original decision was wrong, which implies fallibility in a system that depends on projecting infallibility. Kim Jong-un's willingness to abolish Pyongyang Time in 2018 was, in its own way, as striking as the decision to create it. The clock had served its purpose as a symbol. When a different symbol — rapprochement, two clocks showing the same time — became more useful, the old one was discarded.
North Korea today runs on UTC+9, matching South Korea and Japan. The clocks on both sides of the DMZ read the same time. The people they govern could not be more divided.