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| Lawmakers approve revision bills to the Civil Act and the General Act on Public Administration, during a plenary session at the National Assembly in Yeouido, Seoul, Thursday. Yonhap |
By Lee Hyo-jin
Koreans are expected to get one or two years younger from June next year, as the country has decided to scrap the so-called "Korean age system" in favor of the internationally recognized age calculation standard.
Revisions to the Civil Act and the General Act on Public Administration, which aim to unify the country's multiple age systems to the internationally recognized one, was passed at the plenary session of the National Assembly, Thursday. The revision bills will go into effect after six months.
Under the new bills, an individual's age will be determined based on their birth date. A newborn baby will be counted as 0 year old and infants' age will be measured in months until they turn one year old.
The legislation, which would abolish the centuries-old Korean way of counting one's age, comes amid growing calls to end social confusion from the mixed use of multiple age systems.
In Korea, three age systems are currently in use: the Korean traditional "counting age" system, the internationally recognized system and a third system used for convenience when one's exact birthdate is unknown.
Unlike the international norm that starts with the age of zero at birth and then adds a year on birthdays, under the Korean system, a newborn baby's age is counted starting from one rather than zero, and everyone gets a year older all together on New Year's Day. The third system adds a year to a person's day on the first day of the New Year.
Although Korea has used the international age system in legal and administrative capacities since 1962, people have largely gone by the traditional age system when determining how old they are in daily life.
Due to the mixed use of various methods, confusion and occasional disputes have arisen in society, such as when interpreting policies related to labor, social welfare and more recently in the case of vaccine administration.
Scrapping the Korean age system was one of the campaign pledges of President Yoon Suk-yeol, a promise that garnered wide public support from those preferring a simplified age system.
