True (and a whole host of other countries) though I don't think the South Korean service period is ten years!

Yeah, but my main point here is we spend so much time focusing on what's odd about North Korea that we start to act like they're not humans. They aren't morons. I remember reading an interview with a North Korean defector and he was talking about how anyone who lives there learns to read between the lines of news stories. So like the example he used was, if all the sudden the newspaper started talking about heroic Iraqi rebels fighting the United States, you'd learn "Oh, so the United States has taken over Iraq," even though none of that context would necessarily have been presented to you.