Everybody really is the "other" for North Koreans. - Brian Reynolds Myers

They can't understand why any American in his right mind who's not escaping a jail term or something, would voluntarily want to come to [South] Korea and live here.

[W]hat really changed a generally pro-socialist South Korean public in 1950 to a right-leaning one was a brief taste of North Korean rule. Kim Sŏng-ch’il, for example, writes in his diary of how the KPA occupation made him identify with the ROK for the first time.

[T]he once-marginal myth that the [South Korean] republic came into existence in Shanghai in 1919 as a nationalist state has become orthodox with remarkable speed.