The end of the year (or one of them)

North Korea’s Juche calendar for 2010.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juche_calendar#/media/File:North_Korea_(5015886634).jpg

It's interesting to consider the similarities and differences between South Korean and British attitudes to the Christmas holiday that has just passed. As in my homeland, some Koreans will have celebrated it as a religious occasion, going to church and so on. After all, 28% are now Christian. Nevertheless, I’m sure even the faithful are likely to have embraced the event for what it now truly is:  a celebration of consumer capitalism. But one of the great solaces of living here is  that Christmas is a far less gaudy obstacle to surmount than it is back home. One has to endure the usual execrable Christmas-themed pop music in all the cafes, but life does not ground to a halt under the weight of Santa and his toy-and-commodity laden sleigh as it does in Great Britain.

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I’m living in a country when there are two New Year’s day each year.The latter is approaching fast, while the former isn’t until what in the former’s calendar is called February 10th. But last year it was on 22nd January. This is because the traditional Korean calendar is ‘lunisolar’, that is,  calculated in relation to the cycles of the moon not the sun.

It used to be that way in Europe too. The shift in the arrangement of time away from the moon to bring it closer to the more regular cycle of the solar year occurred under the Roman Empire in 46BC when it was mandated by Julius Caesar – hence its name, the ‘Julian Calendar’. In 1582, the “Gregorian Calendar’, named after Pope Gregory XIII, was introduced. This is still the one we use today. (The main change was in  the spacing of leap years to make the average calendar year 365.2425 days long, which even  more closely approximates the 365.2422-day of the ‘solar’ year.)  But it wasn’t until as recently 1752 that the beginning of the year was officially moved from March 1st to January 1st.

All this history pertains, of course, to Europe alone, or at least it used to. Pre-globalization, in pre-modern Korea as in  the other Chinese influenced countries of East Asia,  a lunisolar calendar was traditionally employed called the Dangun calendar. In South Korea, this still remains the basis on which the dates of  holidays and commemorative events are calculated, such as the Buddha’s birthday and Chuseok. So, South Koreans essentially live according to two significantly different  systems for organizing the passage of time over the course of a year. Like so much else, this reflects the nation’s efforts to absorb Western culture while maintaining ties with indigenous and regional tradition.

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Also note that the universally agreed-upon conventions for calculating when to begin counting the years is welded solidly to Christianity. It’s 2024 next year because Jesus Christ was born 2024 years ago according to the Gregorian calendar.  Hence the fact that the convention is to date events as BC – ‘Before Christ’ – and AD – ‘Anno domini.’  This means that every time we use the normal system for structuring time, we are tacitly placing the Christian religion at the centre of our timekeeping. Critical awareness of this rather obvious bias is why we are now inclined to write BCE – ‘Before the Christian Era’ – and ‘CE’ – “Christian Era.’  But this subtle shift in nomenclature only very marginally decenters Christianity.

Whoever controls the measuring and naming of time, controls society, which is why those in a hurry to change it, also change the calendar. After the French Revolution  of 1789 AD (in the Gregorian calendar) a ‘Republican Calendar’ was adopted, the aim of which was to liberate the citizens of France from tutelage to the timekeeping of the royalist Ancien régime and the bane of Christian religion. But such was the chaos of the times that the leadership could never agree when Year 1 actually began, and so it was regularly amended! Once a convention as practical and vital for social interaction as the calendar is deep-rooted it proves impossible to uproot. Imagine the confusion if, say,  the critical race theorists or another so-called ‘wokeist’ factions sought to shift the organization of the calendar to better reflect their pressing concerns.

It was in a similar attempt to forge an independent and ideologically controllable timekeeping system that in 1997 North Korea adopted a calendar known as the Juche calendar. Year-numbering begins with the birth of the first leader, Kim Il Sung, which is 1912 in the Gregorian calendar, and so is called Juche 1 in the Juche calendar. This means that by my calculation we’re now living in Juche 123, and soon will be in Juche 124, although not until April 15th, Kim’s birthday.  The DPRK, at least officially, has therefore abandoned both the traditional lunisolar and the Western solar calendars. But in practice, there are 3 New Years every year, as North Koreans apparently recognize the Western New Year, the Lunar New Year, and the Juche New Year. This seems rather greedy. But whichever New Year it is they all begin with the same obligation: you must first lay flowers at the bronze statues of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il at Mansudae Grand Monuments in Pyongyang, and statues sited elsewhere throughout the nation.

We can assume with some certainty that the hope for a brighter or better New Year, according to all three calendars, is extremely slim for the children of today’s average North Korean parents,  or even those of the elite. However, through adopting a perverse version of historical consciousness that flattens the past to the mere dozens of years since  1912,  the regime instills in the people a model of history in which the Kim ‘dynasty’ assumes absolute power over past, present, and future. The goal is to  delude them into believing that their children’s better and brighter future is guaranteed – but only if they accept repression by the current regime.  For someone to actually believe this brutal canard must require an extraordinary level of cognitive dissonance. But probably only as elevated as the dissonance required for an American to believe Donald Trump should be the next President of the United States!

NOTES

For more on celebrating New Year (or Years) in North Korea, visit: https://www.uritours.com/blog/north-koreans-celebrate-new-years-3-times-in-one-year/