Moves to overturn ancient system that ages babies by a year
Just two hours after Lee Dong Kil’s daughter was born on New Year’s Eve, the clock struck midnight, 2019 was ushered in, and the infant became two years old. She wasn’t alone, though it happened for her quicker than most: Every baby born in South Korea last year became two on January 1.
According to one of the world’s most unusual agecalculating systems, South Korean babies become one on the day of their birth and then get an additional year tacked on when the calendar hits January 1. A politician is working now to overturn the centuries-old tradition amid complaints that it’s an anachronistic, time-wasting custom that drags down an otherwise ultramodern country.
For parents whose babies are born in December, it can be especially painful. One hour after his daughter’s birth in the central city of Daejeon at 10pm on December 31 of last year, Lee posted the news on social media. His friends immediately showered him with congratulatory messages.
“An hour later, when the New Year began, they phoned me again to say congratulations for my baby becoming two years old,” said Lee, who is 32 internationally but 34 in South Korea. “I thought, ‘Ah, right. She’s now two years old, though it’s been only two hours since she was born. What the heck.”’
The origins of this age reckoning system aren’t clear. Being one upon birth may be linked to the time babies spend in their mothers’ wombs or to an ancient Asian numerical system that didn’t have the concept of zero.
Becoming a year older on January 1? That’s even harder to explain.
It could be that ancient Koreans cared a lot about the year in which they were born in the Chinese 60-year cycle, but, without regular calendars, didn’t care much about the specific day they were born; so they mostly ignored the day of their birth and instead marked another year of age on the day of the Lunar New Year, according to senior curator Jung Yonhak at the National Folk Museum of Korea.
This may have then shifted to the solar New Year on January 1 as the South began embracing the Western calendar. North Korea uses the Western age calculating system, but they have a twist: they follow their own calendar that’s based on the birth of national founder and president-for-life Kim Il Sung.
The year of your birth is still incredibly important in South Korea. Other Asian countries, including Japan and Vietnam, abandoned the Chinese-style age system amid an influx of Western culture. Officially, South Korea has used Western-style calculations since the early 1960s. But its citizens still embrace the oldfashioned system in their daily lives.