The Day Korea Got Younger

One morning in South Korea, tens of millions of people woke up younger than they had been when they went to bed.

Nobody did anything. Nobody took any medicine, nobody went anywhere, nobody signed anything. They simply slept through one night like any other. And yet a child who was eight the evening before might open her eyes the next morning and be only six. Some people became one year younger. Some became two.

Anyone would want to argue at once: that cannot happen.

But it did happen, and people still remember the exact date. It was June 28, 2023.

There is no magic in it at all. This is a story about counting.

For a very long time, Koreans counted age in a way of their own. A newborn baby was already counted as one year old. Then, on the first day of every new year, the whole country grew one year older, together, all at the same moment. Nobody had to wait for their own birthday. Nobody grew older ahead of the neighbors, not even by a single day.

In that way of counting, age was not each person's private business. It was something shared. When the new year came, the grandparents grew older, the parents grew older, and the baby born the day before grew older along with them.

That is how something like this could happen. A baby born in the very last days of the old year was one year old the moment it arrived. A few days later the new year came, and the baby turned two. Two years old, and not yet able to roll over or cut a single tooth.

The extra year at New Year even found its way into a meal. Koreans have long believed that a bowl of tteokguk at Seollal adds one year to a person's age. Tteokguk is a soup of rice cakes, and Seollal is the Lunar New Year in Korea. The white rice cake starts out as long sticks. It is sliced into thin rounds like coins, then dropped into hot broth. The soup is thought to have reached the New Year table around the middle of the Joseon era. Joseon was the dynasty that ruled Korea for about five centuries from 1392.

To Vietnamese ears, this may already sound familiar.

That is because the Vietnamese count in exactly the same way.

They call it tuổi mụ, or tuổi ta. The older generations counted a child's age from the time it was still in its mother's womb, rather than waiting for its first cry. Those nine months and ten days were treated as time already lived. So a baby was one year old at birth.

Then each year comes Tết, the Lunar New Year festival in Vietnam. And people repeat a saying that everyone knows by heart: to celebrate Tết is to grow one year older. The saying is meant quite literally. It is the counting itself.

This way of counting does not belong to Koreans alone, nor to the Vietnamese alone. It is a very old habit of mind found across East Asia, in Japan, on the Korean Peninsula and in Vietnam.

A Vietnamese grandmother, asked how old a grandchild is, will give one number. The child's birth certificate gives another. Neither number is wrong. They are simply counting two different things. One counts how many times a person has passed their own birthday. The other counts how many times they have sat down with the whole family to the New Year feast.

The trouble in South Korea started somewhere else. There, the old way of counting lived side by side with two others.

The first is the way the whole world uses today. A person is zero at birth and adds one on each birthday. The second takes the current year and subtracts the year of birth. Everyone born in the same year is the same age, whatever the month.

Three ways, three numbers. One person could give three different answers to exactly the same question, and none of them would be a lie. Official papers showed one number. In everyday life people gave another. For some matters, a third number was worked out. Living with three numbers for so long became confusing.

So South Korea decided to use a single way of counting on official papers. On June 26, 2023, the government announced the change to the whole country. Two days later, the new way of counting took effect.

Then the morning of June 28 arrived. The whole country woke up, some people one year younger, some two.

Here any child would ask a very real question: where did my birthday go?

The answer is that it went nowhere.

The birthday stayed exactly where it was. In South Korea, the day a child is born has never been a small matter. Since long ago, when a baby has lived exactly one full year, the family has held a large party. And the party falls on the very day the baby was born, not on any other day.

That party celebrates one whole turn of the year that the baby has lived. It has never had anything to do with the number written on official papers.

So on that morning, nobody suddenly lived a year less. Nobody lost a single day. All that changed was the number people wrote down. What had been lived stayed just as it was.

At Tết, a grandmother counts a child's age one way, and the child's birth certificate shows another. The two numbers will differ. Both are worth keeping. One counts the days that belong to a person alone. The other counts the years spent alongside everyone else.