North Korea once created its own time zone

A closer look

Because nothing asserts geopolitical dominance quite like arbitrarily messing with the clocks. In 2015, North Korea decided to create 'Pyongyang Time' by pushing their clocks back exactly 30 minutes, solely to distance themselves from the time zone originally implemented by Japanese imperialists—and conveniently, South Korea. They eventually synchronized back in 2018, but for three years, they proudly operated in a temporal reality half an hour removed from everyone else.