Sohn Yang-Young was appointed governor of South Hamgyeong Province by South Korea’s president last year. The job came with a chauffeur-driven car, secretaries, a spacious office and a mahogany desk with a mother-of-pearl nameplate.

去年，孙扬荣（音）被韩国总统任命为咸镜南道知事。这份工作的待遇包括一辆配有司机的车、秘书、一间宽敞的办公室，还有一张红木办公桌，上面摆着珍珠母镶嵌的铭牌。

But Mr. Sohn has never been to South Hamgyeong, because it is in North Korea.

但孙扬荣从未去过咸镜南道，因为它在朝鲜境内。

South Korea has never formally accepted the division of the Korean Peninsula, which was imposed by the United States and the Soviet Union at the end of World War II. (Neither has North Korea, for that matter.) To assert its claim, the South appoints its own governors for five provinces in the North.

韩国从未正式接受美国和苏联在二战结束时施行的朝鲜半岛分治。（朝鲜实际上也没有接受。）为了坚持自己的主张，韩国任命了自己在朝鲜五个道的知事。

A chart in Mr. Sohn’s office bears the names and photos of dozens of officials who would help him administer South Hamgyeong “should the day come.” That day would be when the two Koreas unify — a remote prospect, to say the least.

孙扬荣办公室的一张图表上印有数十名官员的姓名和照片，“如果那一天到了，”他们将帮助他管理咸镜南道。那一天就是朝韩统一之时——至少可以说是一个遥远的前景。

Reaching South Hamgyeong would be a homecoming of sorts for Mr. Sohn, 73. It is the province his late parents fled during the Korean War and missed for the rest of their lives, which they spent in the South. North Korea has redrawn South Hamgyeong’s boundaries since the war, but the family’s roots remain.

对于73岁的孙扬荣来说，到达咸镜南道将是一次回家之旅。他已故的父母在朝鲜战争期间逃离了咸镜南道，余生在韩国度过，十分怀念家乡。战后，朝鲜重新划分了咸镜南道的边界，但孙家的根还在那里。

“I always keep myself ready to go up there to take over,” Mr. Sohn said in an interview at his office in the Committee for the Five northern Korean Provinces. (The committee refuses to capitalize “northern” in its official English name, just as North Korea once referred to “south Korea.”)

“我时刻准备着去那里接管，”孙扬荣在以北五道委员会办公室接受采访时说。（该委员会在其正式英文名称的“北”一词中拒绝使用首字母大写，朝鲜也曾拒绝给“南朝鲜”英文名称中的“南”使用首字母大写）。

Reunification is a deeply personal matter for millions of Koreans whose families came south during the war, and for the tens of thousands of North Koreans who defected more recently. Decades after Germany and Vietnam became whole after their wartime divisions, many still wait for Korea to take its turn.

对于数百万在战争期间举家南下的朝鲜人和近年叛逃的数万朝鲜人来说，统一是一件非常私人的事情。在因战争分裂的德国和越南实现统一几十年后，许多人仍在等待韩国也重新统一。

孙扬荣在首尔办公室展示1950年朝鲜战争期间，从朝鲜兴南撤离的平民和联合国部队的照片。他的父母就是逃难的平民。

But for many others, in North and South alike, that dream has faded.

但对另一些人来说，无论是在北方还是南方，这个梦想都已淡去。

In December, North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, renounced peaceful unification as a policy goal. He later called for revising the North’s Constitution to remove all references to reunification, define the North as a separate Korean state and declare that it would annex South Korea, possibly using nuclear weapons, if the South should start a war.

12月，朝鲜领导人金正恩宣布放弃将和平统一作为政策目标。随后，他呼吁修改朝鲜宪法，删除所有有关统一的内容，将朝鲜定义为一个独立国家，并宣布如果韩国发动战争，朝鲜会将其吞并，而且可能使用核武器。

On Wednesday, North Korea’s official Korean Central News Agency said the Supreme People’s Assembly, the North’s rubber-stamp Parliament, had revised the Constitution this week in accordance with Mr. Kim’s wishes, but it did not release the amended text.

本周三，朝鲜官方的朝鲜中央通讯社称，朝鲜的橡皮图章议会——最高人民会议——本周按照金正恩的意愿修改了宪法，但并未公布修改后的文本。

In South Korea, more and more people — especially among the young — say they oppose reunification. Many cite the likely costs of integrating their capitalist economy with that of the impoverished, socialist North.

在韩国，越来越多的人——尤其是年轻人——表示反对统一。许多人提到了将他们的资本主义经济与贫穷的社会主义朝鲜经济融合可能付出的代价。

Mr. Sohn lamented that his own grandchildren didn’t share his passion for bringing the Koreas together.

孙扬荣感叹道，他的孙辈们并不像他一样热衷于促成统一。

“They don’t teach it at school,” he said. “The younger generations live in so much affluence and they are so inured to tensions with North Korea they don’t realize that the peace they enjoy is not permanent.”

“学校不教这些，”他说。“年轻一代的生活如此富足，他们对与朝鲜的紧张关系已经习以为常，意识不到他们享受的和平并不是永久的。”

In Mr. Sohn’s office, the dream is still alive and poignant. The committee he works for, created in 1949, operates from a quiet five-story building tucked into the foothills of northern Seoul. An arm of the South’s Home Ministry, it has a yearly budget of $7.2 million and pays each of its five governors an annual salary of $110,000.

在他的办公室里，这个梦想依然鲜活而深沉。他所供职的委员会成立于1949年，在首尔北部山脚下一座僻静的五层建筑里开展工作。委员会隶属于韩国行政安全部，每年的预算为720万美元（约合人民币5000万元），五位知事每人的年薪为11万美元。

位于首尔北部的大楼，孙扬荣和其他被任命的知事就在这里工作。

The South also has a Unification Ministry, which has served as a channel for dialogue with the North during the two sides’ occasional periods of détente. But the ministry’s North Korean counterpart, the National Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of the Fatherland, was abolished by Mr. Kim this year.

韩国还有一个统一部，在双方偶尔缓和的时期充当与朝鲜对话的渠道。但该部在朝鲜的对应机构——祖国和平统一全国委员会——已于今年被金正恩撤销。

Analysts have pondered questions like who would take over North Korea, and what would happen to its nuclear arsenal, should Mr. Kim’s regime implode in a coup or some other unforeseen event. But reunification has become a hollow slogan.

分析人士们思考的是如果金正恩的政权在政变或其他不可预见的事件中发生内讧，谁将接管朝鲜，朝鲜的核武库又将何去何从之类的问题。而统一已成为一个空洞的口号。

The Koreas have drifted apart politically, economically and even linguistically. In recent years, they have aligned themselves more closely with opposing geopolitical blocs — the North with Russia and China, and the South with the United States and Japan.

朝韩两国在政治、经济甚至语言上都渐行渐远。近年来，他们更加紧密地与对立的地缘政治集团结盟——朝鲜与俄罗斯和中国，韩国与美国和日本。

Still, until Mr. Kim disavowed it, both sides had championed reunification as a sacrosanct goal. In the North, state propaganda preached it. In the South, pop songs that channeled the pain of the national divide and the yearning for unification became classics.

尽管如此，在金正恩否认统一之前，双方都将统一视为神圣不可侵犯的目标。在朝鲜，政府宣传机构宣扬统一。在韩国，表达民族分裂痛苦和统一渴望的流行歌曲成为了经典。

大楼展厅中展示的朝鲜徽章和勋章。

But each government claims the entire peninsula, and each rejects the other’s claim. Mr. Kim’s grandfather, Kim Il-sung, the North’s first leader, tried to reunify the countries by force in 1950. Millions were killed before the Korean War was halted in a truce three years later. The two nations are technically still at war.

但两个政府都声称拥有整个半岛，而且都拒绝接受对方的主张。金正恩的祖父、朝鲜第一任领导人金日成曾在1950年试图用武力统一两国。朝鲜战争在三年后暂时停止，数百万人丧生。严格来说，两国仍处于战争状态。

This year, Mr. Kim began removing the word tongil, which means reunification, from state propaganda and from the names of train stations. He has punished people for watching K-pop videos, and in recent months his government has launched thousands of balloons to dump trash on South Korea. On Wednesday, his military said it would “permanently shut off and block” the countries’ border by cutting off long-unused roads and railways built during a brief period of rapprochement.

今年，金正恩开始从国家宣传和火车站名称中删除“统一”一词。他惩罚观看K-pop视频的人，最近几个月，他的政府发射了数千个气球，向韩国倾倒垃圾。周三，他的军队表示将“永久关闭和封锁”两国边界，切断在短暂和解期间修建的长期闲置的公路和铁路。

Ji Seong-ho, a 42-year-old North Korean defector who is the South Korean-appointed governor of North Hamgyeong, his native province, blames Mr. Kim for the fading interest in reunification.

42岁的脱北者池成浩（音）是韩国任命的咸镜北道知事，那里是他的家乡，他把人们对统一的兴趣减退归咎于金正恩。

“Once they lost the competition with South Korea, North Korean leaders realized that they could not support reunification because there would be no place for them in a unified Korea,” said Mr. Ji, who defected in 2006. “Kim Jong-un is helping South Koreans lose interest in reunification while discouraging his people from dreaming of a unified Korea.”

“一旦在与韩国的竞争中败下阵来，朝鲜领导人就会意识到，他们不可能支持统一，因为统一后的朝鲜没有他们的位置，”2006年叛逃的池成浩说。“金正恩正在促使韩国人失去对统一的兴趣，同时让他的人民不再梦想一个统一的朝鲜。”

韩国任命2006年从朝鲜叛逃的池成浩担任其家乡咸镜北道的知事。

Still, Mr. Sohn, Mr. Ji and the other appointed governors try to keep hope alive. They attend meetings and social events aimed at supporting refugees from the North and preserving the prewar cultural heritage of their provinces, something they fear the communist regime in the North is neglecting.

尽管如此，孙扬荣、池成浩和其他被任命的知事仍努力保持希望。他们参加各种会议和社交活动，旨在支持来自朝鲜的难民，并保护他们所在道的战前文化遗产，他们担心朝鲜的共产党政权会忽视这些遗产。

In the lobby of the committee headquarters, a newsstand offers free newsletters published by provincial friendship associations. The provinces’ five flags stand in front of the building. A monument depicts two hands shaking in a symbol of unity.

在委员会总部的大厅里，一个报摊免费提供各道友好协会出版的简报。大楼前矗立着五面道旗。一座纪念碑上的两只手紧紧握在一起，象征着团结。

Mr. Sohn’s family, like countless others, was divided by the war. His parents left a son and daughter behind when they left the North, boarding an American cargo ship on which Mr. Sohn was born. His parents never saw his siblings again.

与无数其他人一样，孙扬荣的家庭也因战争而分裂。他的父母留下一儿一女离开，登上了一艘美国货船，孙扬荣就在船上出生。他的父母再也没见过他的兄弟姐妹。

Mr. Ji said his own life story showed what a difference reunification could make for North Koreans.

池成浩说，他自己的人生经历表明了统一可以给朝鲜人带来多么大的变化。

He had lost an arm and a leg in a train accident, and the disability made him a social outcast in the North, forcing him to beg for food. But in the South, he attended college and served as a lawmaker before being appointed North Hamgyeong’s governor in August.

他在一次火车事故中失去了一只胳膊和一条腿，残疾使他在朝鲜成为社会的弃儿，不得不乞讨度日。但在韩国，他上了大学，当过议员，今年8月被任命为咸镜北道知事。

“The first thing I would do if I returned to the North as governor is to increase food rations for its starving people,” Mr. Ji said. “South Korea has so much rice in surplus that the rising cost of storing it has become a problem.”

“如果我回到朝鲜担任知事，我会做的第一件事就是增加给饥民的食物配给，”池成浩说。“韩国有如此多的大米盈余，以至于不断增加的储存成本都成了一个问题。”

大楼外的“和解与统一雕像”。