An official North Korean calendar for 2025 continues to use “Day of the Sun” and “Day of the Shining Star” to refer to the birthdays of the country’s former leaders, despite signs last year that the regime was phasing out these long-standing names in an apparent bid to bolster Kim Jong Un’s personality cult.
Both Kim Il Sung’s birthday on April 15 and Kim Jong Il’s on Feb. 8 retain the designations, which reflect their semi-divine status within the country’s leadership mythology, in the latest calendar published by the DPRK’s Foreign Languages Publishing House and obtained by NK News.