ABSTRACT

In March 2015, the U.S. ambassador to South Korea, Mark Lippert, was attacked by a knife-wielding activist protesting joint American-South Korean military exercises. The same assailant had been convicted in 2010 for assaulting a Japanese envoy (Choe and Sheer, 2015). Although such radical incidents are far from commonplace, they do highlight the passions that drive nationalism in modern Korea.