NPR (“South Koreans are getting a year younger, parliament rules“):
South Koreans will soon become a year or two younger, following an official change to the country’s age-counting system.
On Thursday, the country’s parliament, called the National Assembly, passed a set of bills requiring the use of the international age-counting system, where age is based on birth date.
South Korea currently uses three age-counting systems, but most citizens abide by the “Korean age,” where a person is 1 year old as soon as they are born, and gain one year on every New Year’s Day. And a baby born on Dec. 31 would be considered 2 years old the next day.
The change will go into effect this coming June.
So technically, babies born from now until then could still go by the traditional “Korean age” system.
While a majority of South Koreans go by the “Korean age,” most seem to support the move to the more widely used system, where a person is zero on the day they are born and gain a year every birthday.
Joining the vast majority of the planet in doing this the sane way strikes me as a good idea. Indeed, this has been more an artifact than a daily practice:
South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol had promised to unify the country’s age-counting systems on the campaign trail earlier this year, saying that they created “unnecessary social and economic costs.”
South Korea has been tallying age by birth dates since the 1960s.
But while most East Asian countries have scrapped the traditional age-counting system, some have yet to follow suit.
For example, in China, which uses the nominal age-counting system, a person is considered 1 year old on the day they are born, and they gain a year on the Lunar New Year.
Wikipedia has an entry for “East Asian age reckoning” but doesn’t explain its rationale, other than that “age was counted with ordinal numbers, not cardinal numbers; also, age was counted from the lunar new year, not from the date of birth.”
