Lawmakers Considering Eliminating “Korean Age”

It will be interesting to see if this actually happens:

Early this month, Rep. Hwang Ju-hong of the minor opposition Party for Democracy and Peace submitted a bill that has drawn surprisingly keen public attention. 

The proposed legislation, jointly handed in by nine other fellow lawmakers of rival parties, calls for mandatory use of the standard “international” age system at all government and public institutions, while recommending that private sector organizations such as companies adopt the same system for administrative matters.
A source of amazement to many foreigners who are unfamiliar with this country, but otherwise common knowledge to most expats living here, South Korea has kept its unique way of counting a person’s age alongside international age.

The most widely known system, referred to as “Korean age,” is the method whereby one year is simply added to a person’s Western age calculating how many years and months that person has lived since his or her birthday.

So if a man was born on January 1, 1980, he is 39 by the international standard but would introduce himself as being 40 years of age in Korea.
Everyone also gets a year older on New Year’s Day, rather than on their actual birthdays.

Such tradition is known to have derived from ancient East Asian thinking that counts the gestational period as part of a person’s age, according to experts. The time in the mother’s womb has been considered as also part of life.

Yonhap

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