Here's how South Koreans went to bed this week and woke up at least one year younger.
The population of South Korea became younger overnight.
Residents awoke Wednesday with reset age clocks that shaved up to two years off their birth date.
The new numbers came courtesy of a change to the government's way of calculating age.
Under the new code, age will be determined by starting at zero on a person's date of birth and adding one year at each birthday.
That's the system used most often in the world. But under the Asian country's most widely used method, sometimes called the "Korean age," a newborn was considered 1 year old, and a year was added each Jan. 1. That meant a baby born on Dec. 31 would turn 2 the next day.
There's also a third way of calculating age in South Korea. It's a mix of the international and Korean age systems and under that method, a baby is at zero years, and one year is added each Jan. 1.
Confused? So were many South Koreans, and the multi-age-counting systems have created controversy.
“We expect legal disputes, complaints and social confusion that have been caused over how to calculate ages will be greatly reduced,” Lee Wan-kyu, the minister of government legislation, told reporters this week.
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