AKIPRESS.COM - North Korea said today it will establish its own time zone next week by pulling back its current standard time by 30 minutes, Tampa Bay Times reports.

Local time in North and South Korea and Japan is the same – nine hours ahead of GMT. It was set during Japan's rule over what was single Korea from 1910 to 1945.

The establishment of "Pyongyang time" is meant to root out the legacy of the Japanese colonial period, the North's official Korean Central News Agency said. It said the new time zone will take effect August 15 – the 70th anniversary of Korea's liberation from Japanese rule at the end of World War II.

The North's move appears to be aimed at bolstering the leadership of Kim Jong Un with anti-Japan, nationalistic sentiments, believes Yang Moo Jin, a professor at the University of North Korean Studies in Seoul. Kim took power upon the death of his dictator father, Kim Jong Il, in late 2011.

Most time zones in the world differ in increments of an hour and only a small number of countries like Iran and Myanmar use zones that are offset by a half-hour.

The time zone that North Korea plans to use is what a single Korea adopted in 1908, though the peninsula came under the same Japanese zone in 1912, two years after Tokyo's colonial occupation began. After the liberation, North Korea has maintained the current time zone, while South Korea had briefly used the old zone from 1954 to 1961.