(Seoul) Lee Jung-hee feels rejuvenated. This South Korean, who was due to turn 60 next year, lost a year overnight, with the abandonment of the ancestral system of age calculation in South Korea on Wednesday.
Until now, a baby was automatically one year old when it was born and aged one year every 1er January – and not on his birthday as the international system dictates.
Thus, under the Korean age, a child born on December 31 was automatically 2 years old the next day.
But on Wednesday, Seoul buried its traditional counting system for good, instantly rejuvenating thousands of South Koreans by one or two years…
“It feels good,” exclaims Lee Jung-hee, a housewife from Seoul. “For people like me, who are supposed to be 60 next year, you still feel young,” she laughs to AFP.
South Korea was the latest East Asian country to count months spent in utero to determine the age of its nationals. China, Japan and even neighboring North Korea abandoned this system decades ago.
“It’s complicated when a foreigner asks me my age, because I know he wants to talk about my international age, so I have to do the calculations,” Hong Suk-min, a 47-year-old office worker, told AFP. years according to Korean age, but 45 in the rest of the world.
From now on, the law requires the use of the international system for official documents.
The reform will have a limited impact: the age on a passport, the age at which you can be criminally prosecuted as a minor, pension benefits or health services already use the international date of birth.
Social confusion
But Seoul hopes dropping the Korean age will lessen the social confusion that arises from using different systems.
“There is a difference between the age that Koreans use in their daily life and the legal age,” Minister Lee Wan-kyu told AFP, saying that this difference “could give rise to various legal disputes”.
This minister responsible for government reform started a press conference on Monday, explaining to Korean journalists how to calculate their age from now on.
You have to “subtract your year of birth from the current year. If your birthday has passed, you get your age, and if your birthday has not passed, then take one off to get your age,” he patiently explained.
But Seoul still calculates differently the age of its nationals for compulsory military service or the legal age to smoke or consume alcohol. To fix this so-called age “of the year”, the years are counted from zero at birth, and every 1er January.
This system will remain in place for the time being, the minister announced, without excluding a later reform of the “age of the year”.
“Age Matters”
In South Korean culture, “age really matters,” anthropologist Mo Hyun-joo told AFP, because it has an impact on social status, titles and other honorifics.
In Korean, “it’s hard to communicate with people without knowing their age,” she says, noting that instead of using names, terms like “unni” and “oppa” – which mean respectively big sister and big brother.
The anthropologist believes it is possible that over time, the “hierarchical culture based on age will fade a bit” by dint of using the international age.
For now, most South Koreans, like schoolboy Yoon Jae-ha of Busan, a southern port city, are content to feel younger as the new laws come into effect.
“My age has shrunk”, he rejoices, before adding: “I like being younger, because my mother will take care of me longer”.