Over 700,000 signed the petition to abolish the refugee application.
http://www1.president.go.kr/petitions/269548
They the South Koreans need to be scared of God, for one day they too could become refugees. Have they forgotten the sufferings of the second world war already?
Vast majority of religious South Koreans are Christians or Buddhists embedded within a Confucian social fabric.
The older generation remembers the wars well, the experience fades with every new generation.
The Korean diaspora is mostly in the US, they went as immigrants not refugees. Americans don't seem to have a problem with the presence of South Koreans. I don't think many South Koreans would sympathize with accepting refugees from a Saudi vs Iran proxy war, one where even regional nations don't properly accommodate them.
As single nation states, Japanese and Koreans are extremely xenophobic.
South Korean sense of nationalism and self identity is very high and goes beyond religion, its going to be this way for the foreseeable future. We are talking about a nation that is willing to donate gold to their government in order to resolve its financial issues and weather global instability. They did it in 1998 to survive the Asian Financial Crisis.
3.5 million people donated their gold family heirlooms, sports medals, and jewellery to the government in order to pay the IMF.
http://www.usfunds.com/investor-lib...old-came-to-south-koreas-rescue/#.W2FFrdJKiUk
Koreans distrust any entity and peoples that they perceive as not willing to make similar sacrifices to maintain their society. The refugees especially ones from countries like Yemen are seen as a group of people that will do harm. They distrust all their neighbours as well, some also think their neighbours are plotting conspiracies against them. One needs to understand Korea's history to understand their current perspective. The Korean people are willing to make sacrifices to their nation because they trust that it would act in the best interests of them and their children, the only way they see this trust being maintained is if it stays homogeneous. Being historically squeezed and attacked, maintaining insular posturing is a survival strategy. From their view, Yemeni refugees are just another attacker part of the arc of Korean history.
From what I understand, South Koreans watches the Migrant Crisis situation in Europe and wants to prevent that from happening in South Korea at all costs, some think a new type of warfare is being waged upon them. They have protest signs saying "Don't be like Europe", "We want to be safe", "Our safety is first". Females seems to be very vocal about the migrants due to the precedent of the migrant crisis in Europe. Different people would view the migrant situation differently but to Koreans, it is apocalyptic. Koreans have a relatively sensitive survival instinct embedded within their society and the migrants triggers that survival instinct.