North Korea's State News Agency, KCNA, reported last Thursday that the country will create its new time zone by resetting their current time back by 30 minutes. The resetting will happen this August 15th, which also marks their 70th year of independence from Japan.
Called "Pyongyang Time," it will be GMT +08:30, the time used before the Japanese conquered them. According to KCNA, "The wicked Japanese imperialists committed such unpardonable crimes as depriving Korea of even its standard time while mercilessly trampling down its land with 5,000 year-long history and culture and pursuing the unheard-of policy of obliterating the Korean nation." This, added the news agency, "shall be fixed as the standard time of the DPRK [Democratic People's Republic of Korea]."
In effect, North Korea will be ahead of the Eastern Standard Time by 12 and a half hours, but will be behind Tokyo and Seoul's time by half an hour.
Jeong Joon-hee, the South Korean Unification Ministry spokesman, has however warned in a briefing last Friday that turning back the clock could cause some problems. Jeong said that some difficulties are likely to happen and will come in the inter-Korean exchanges, which includes flows to and from the Kaesong Industrial Complex. Jeong also mentioned that in the long run, it might have negative effects on the inter-Korean integration.
South Korea has done the same in the past and has had its time zone reset to Pyongyang Time from 1954 to 1961, but proposals in the past years were made to move it back again, the most recent of which was in 2013.
North Korea has been known to have its "own world" in a lot of ways. They have their own calendar which reckons from the birth of their founding leader, Kim Il Sung, and not from the birth of Christ. Since Kim was born in 1912, which they refer to as Juche 1, this year then becomes Juche 104.
