PAJU, South Korea — Peering at North Korea in the hazy distance from the demilitarized zone, standing under an upbeat mural trumpeting improved relations between the separated countries, a visitor from South Korea struck a skeptical note.

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“We sent them food, fertilizer, factories, more than we give our own poor people,” said the South Korean, Lee Soon-hwan, a 30-year-old office worker. “And all they pay us back with is this nuclear test.”

After years of hope that relations with the North would thaw if the South tried to coax it into engagement, regional experts and others speak of growing disenchantment. Many South Koreans reacted with exasperation and even anger to North Korea’s nuclear test on Monday, uncharacteristically harsh responses in a country that has long been more tolerant of its unruly northern neighbor than have its allies in Washington and Tokyo.

Partly, the reaction reflects the outrage here at the timing of the test, coming as South Korea was in mourning over the suicide of a former president on Saturday.

But there are also signs of fatigue with a recalcitrant North that has responded to the South’s largess by continuing to build up its nuclear arsenal.

“There has been a paradigm shift in how South Koreans view North Korea,” said Jeung Young-tai, a North Korea expert at the Korea Institute for National Unification. “The nuclear test has made people feel that North Korea has gone too far, and it’s high time for us to be tough on North Korea.”

The engagement policy followed years of enforced separation and relentless anti-North propaganda that ignored South Korea’s deep emotional bonds with the other half of the peninsula, forced apart, as they see it, by big-power politics during the cold war. The so-called sunshine policy began in the late 1990s and was broadly popular, even surviving the first North Korean nuclear test in 2006.

But Mr. Jeung said that people now felt no safer after 10 years of engagement and that the latest nuclear test, along with the North’s test-firing of a long-range rocket last month, had driven home to many in South Korea their need to build up their own military, and stick with their traditional ally, the United States.

Such a shift may bring South Korea closer in many ways to Washington. A sign came Tuesday, when President Lee Myung-bak announced that South Korea would belatedly join the Proliferation Security Initiative, an American-led program to intercept ships suspected of carrying unconventional weapons. The South had refrained from joining for fear of angering the North.

At the same time, fundamental differences with the United States remain. While Washington has in the past spoken of blockades and further isolating North Korea, few South Koreans are talking about cutting off aid and economic relations completely.

Instead, the South Korean public appears ready to accept continued engagement, but with new demands that North Korea also show good faith, particularly by curtailing its weapons program.

Still, even talk of imposing conditions on aid suggests a shift in attitudes for South Koreans, who have long viewed the North as a proud but poor cousin that should be tolerated and led toward eventually peaceful reunification. Such sentiments guided South Korean policy for a decade, as Seoul opened an industrial park and a mountain resort in the North, and extended it hundreds of millions of dollars in aid.

Those ties began to sour after the election last year of Mr. Lee, a conservative who said aid should be offered only if the North ended its nuclear program. Weariness with the North has also grown over the past year, after the North responded to Mr. Lee’s tougher stance by temporarily closing access to the Kaesong industrial park, detaining a South Korean accused of slandering the North Korean government, and test-firing a long-range rocket in April.

“South Koreans are feeling frustration and fatigue with the North Korea relationship,” said Daniel Pinkston, North East Asia deputy project director at International Crisis Group, an nonprofit organization that tries to prevent deadly conflicts. “They want more reciprocity.”

While there have been no recent public opinion polls, the shift has begun emerging in online chat rooms and newspaper opinion articles, like one in JoongAng Ilbo on Wednesday entitled “Stop Being Suckers for Kim Jong-il.”

The tougher attitudes were also apparent in more than a dozen recent street interviews with South Koreans at places like the Unification Observatory in Paju, an hour northwest of Seoul overlooking the demilitarized zone.

Many of those interviewed said they were frustrated that North Korea seemed to be pushing their country around, although the South was the one opening its pocketbook. And while no one called for cutting off the North outright, most agreed that South Korea should get more benefits, and more respect, for its money.

“I’m tired of the whole relationship,” said Kim Bong-jin, 52, who owns a machinery factory nearby. “The past administrations have supported North Korea too excessively, and the result is nuclear weapons.”

His friend, Lim Jae-hyung, 52, a technician, said, “We have the money, we should be getting more from it.”

From the observatory, the vastly different levels of wealth between the Koreas were plainly visible. In the North Korean town of Maegol, people could be seen walking along dirt roads between gray buildings with no vehicles in sight. By contrast, a busy six-lane highway cut through Paju, a popular tourist area with a go-kart track, a drive-in theater and rows of gaudy “love” hotels.

While conservatives have always taken a hard line toward the North, many on the left who supported the sunshine policy also say they are fed up with the North Koreans. This was particularly evident among supporters of former President Roh Moo-hyun, who jumped to his death on Saturday. A suicide note suggested that he was despondent about a corruption investigation.

Mr. Roh had pursued friendly engagement with the North, and many of those who mourned him at makeshift altars on Wednesday expressed anger at the North over the nuclear test, which they called an unforgivable show of callous disregard.

“It is unbelievable that they would do this at such a sad and sensitive time,” said one mourner, Kang Han-seung.