Maybe you don't know yet, but in South Korea age is counted in a very different way. To give you an idea, babies in the country are born at one year old. However, a new law may finally establish a standard in this counting, as a South Korean has not just one age, but three: an “international”, a “Korean” and a “calendar”.
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Confused? Calm down, let us explain! The country has three distinct systems for counting a person's age: there is the international system, which uses the person's date of birth; the official one, where babies are born at 0 years old and gain a year every January 1st, and the “Korean age” method, which is the most used socially, where everyone is automatically one year old at birth and becomes one year older old on New Year's Day, regardless of date of birth.
In practice, a person born on December 30, 1995 would have 28 years of Korean age, 26 years of international age and, at the same time, 27 years of official age. This tradition of calculating age started in China and has become part of the culture in different parts of Asia, but South Korea is the only country that still maintains it. Or at least it was.
This is because the country's parliament decreed that, from June 2023, all official documents must follow the “international age” standard. The law will standardize the use of international age in all “judicial and administrative areas”, and the parliament's own website says that state and local governments should encourage citizens to use their 'international age' and provide the necessary promotion to do so. .
The decision comes to reduce unnecessary socioeconomic costs. The discussion about age in South Korea is not new: as early as 2019, a bill introduced by Representative Hwang Ju-hong warned that the three methods were responsible for conflicts by promoting a culture of hierarchy based on age.
