Unsolved Mystery: A Big September for South Korea and Arkansas

While reviewing the usage stats here at the CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas for the month of September, I noticed a huge influx of web visits from South Korea: 8,208 to be exact. (Monthly visits to the CALS EOA from South Korea usually total around 100.) Some of our most common visiting nations include Australia (1,263 in September), Canada (2,472), and the UK (2,154) after the United States, which makes up the vast majority of the EOA’s visitors.

Curious, I went looking to see what I could find connecting Arkansas and South Korea.

Looking back in history, Arkansas sent about 6,300 people to fight in the Korean War in the 1950s, and Arkansas has a number of markers and memorials for those who served. (Learn even more about the war from the CALS Butler Center for Arkansas Studies’ Forgotten: The Arkansas Korean War Project.)

In modern news, Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders visited South Korea in March 2024 and signed two economic cooperation agreements with the intention of promoting commercial relations and information exchange, as well as strengthening Arkansas’s agricultural and lithium industries.

Here are some more recent economic stats and facts I found from the Arkansas Economic Development Commission:

• Korea is Arkansas’s eighth-largest trade partner.
• Arkansas exports over $100 million in goods to Korea each year, including paper, cotton, and plastics.
• Korean companies have facilities all over the state from Pine Bluff (Jefferson County) to Bentonville (Benton County).

Based on data from the 2020 Census, 5,632 Koreans call Arkansas home; Arkansas’s largest Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) populations are in the northwestern part of the state, plus Pulaski County.

Another connection is ATA Martial Arts, previously known as the American Taekwondo Association, founded in 1969 by Haeng Ung Lee and headquartered in Little Rock. After teaching taekwondo for several years at the U.S. Air Force base at Osan in South Korea, Haeng Ung Lee immigrated to the United States in 1962.

Frustrated by the inconsistent quality of taekwondo instruction in the United States, Lee founded the American Taekwondo Association in 1969 in Omaha, Nebraska. He moved the headquarters to Little Rock in 1977, stating that the hills of central Arkansas reminded him of his Korean homeland. In 2009, the $6 million H.U. Lee International Gate and Garden was established beside the Statehouse Convention Center in Little Rock. ATA opened its nearly 46,000-square-foot international headquarters building on Little Rock’s Riverfront Drive in 2016.

I didn’t find any specific reason for September 2024 being a particularly popular time for South Koreans to check out Arkansas history and culture, but it was a fun dive into older and newer connections.

Update: It came to our attention after this post went up that the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) announced on September 10, 2024, that Army Sgt. Charles E. Beaty, age 26, of Lake City, Arkansas, who was killed during the Korean War, had been accounted for April 5, 2024. More here: https://www.dpaa.mil/News-Stories/ID-Announcements/Article/3808768/soldier-accounted-for-from-korean-war-beaty-c/ That may well have been the reason for the increased web traffic from Korea.

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What will spark you to take a deep dive into the EOA? (You can always start with the “Surprise Me” button on the homepage!)

By J. Jobe, EOA editorial assistant and CALS Writing Circle programmer