SEOUL, South Korea — 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.

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

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.

A chart in 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.

Reaching South Hamgyeong would be a homecoming of sorts for Sohn, 73. It is the province his late parents fled during the Korean War and missed for the rest of their lives, spent in the South.

“I always keep myself ready to go up there to take over,” 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.”)

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.

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

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 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 starts a war.

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 Kim’s wishes, but it did not release the text.

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

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

“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.”

In 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.

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 detente. But the ministry’s North Korean counterpart, the National Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of the Fatherland, was abolished by Kim this year.

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

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.

Still, until 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.

But each government claims the entire peninsula, and each rejects the other’s claim. 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.

This year, 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 his government has launched thousands of balloons to dump trash on South Korea.

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

“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 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.”

Still, Sohn, 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.

At 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.

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 Sohn was born. His parents never saw his siblings again.

Ji said his story showed what a difference reunification could make for North Koreans. He had lost an arm and a leg in a train accident, and the disability made him an 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.

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