A number of late nineteenth-century orientalist intellectuals popularized the term in their writings on Korea. In particular, the orientalist and Protestant minister William Elliot Griffis helped push the hermit moniker for the peninsula with his 1882 book Corea, the Hermit Nation. Griffis had already been involved in Meiji modernization and his contacts within Japan allowed him access to material on Korea. The peninsula's importance to Western interaction with East Asia was, at best, peripheral for most of the nineteenth century. Most of the regional focus of the West was on either the Chinese markets or the Japanese after Perry's visit to Japan. This meant that Korea remained largely an unknown to Western observers outside its immediate geography. Therefore, the late-nineteenth century writers on Korean affairs like Griffis or Henry Davenport Northrop tended to write of Korea as a country that was locked out of the wider stream of time. For this narrative, the term hermit fit because it suggested a self-imposed isolation. Griffis's introduction has a rather flowery explanation of Korea's isolation that simultaneously explains it as well as dismissing it as a relic of the past:

The most striking fact manifested in the past history of Corea is the national policy of almost complete isolation and non-intercourse with other nations of the world. In this indisposition to intercourse with other countries, the Coreans have been greatly assisted by the physical environment of their country, surrounded as it is on three sides by ocean waters, with but few safe landings and harbors, and separated from the Asiatic continent by an inhospitable mountain barrier. Nothwithstanding the national policy of this seagirt and hermit nation has for ages steadily resisted the rising tide of progress and civilization, she has at last been compelled to open her gates both by sea and land, to social, commercial, and political intercourse with other nations and peoples. This great revolution in the customs of the people and the policy of the government has only been inaugurated within a recent period.

Northrop likewise depicts Korea as having awakened from a long slumber as did other Western commentators like Arnold Henry Savage-Landor.

One of the many problems with the term Hermit Kingdom is that it tended to frame Korean history only through its relationship, or lack of one, with the West. Nineteenth-century use of the term tended to ignore or explain away Korea's long history of governmental, cultural, and social interaction with its neighbors. Moreover, Korea's government was not the only one that sought to limit the penetration of Westerners in Korean society in the nineteenth century. Both the Japanese and Chinese sought to do the same, with varying results, and the marginality of Korea to Western trading and political networks meant that its isolation policies only came under siege a generation or two later than its neighbors.

But the Hermit moniker stuck, especially after the Japanese occupation of the peninsula. Japanese imperial policies of trade protectionism restricted Western access to the peninsula outside of a few missionaries. Korea received a relatively low priority for Allied policymakers in the Second World War. Roosevelt and Truman's Secretary of State Edward Stettinius Jr. reportedly could not find Korea on a map and there were very few specialists proficient in Korean during the postwar occupation. Donald MacDonald, one of the State Department's officials for the occupation recalled that on the boat ride to Inchon, the only printed material he could find on Korea were a few pages of Terry's 1905 Japanese Empire, which were subsequently typed out and mimeographed for the rest of the occupation forces.

Given this paucity of information, it was not surprising that these older forms of describing Korea had greater longevity in the West, especially since the post Korean War DPRK has little engagement with the West. But terms like the Hermit Kingdom do not so much explain the DPRK as muddle the actual nature of its history and foreign policy. The DPRK's at times eclectic foreign policy is far from hermit-like and sometimes quite shrewd, as historians like Charles Armstrong have shown in their various works. As with other colloquialisms for entire countries, the term Hermit Kingdom says more about the speaker than the subject.