I'm in Korea and I've yet to meet someone who actually wants the US troops out. I've met people vaguely annoyed with drunken US soldiers and stuff like that, but as far as annecdata goes, I think Korea wants US troops.
> I'm in Korea and I've yet to meet someone who actually wants the US troops out.
That's because voicing such opinions, particularly to foreign strangers, is so far outside the established Overton window that South Koreans have been jailed for voicing them while working in the wrong occupation [0].
Case in point: Just look at the history of the No Gun Ri massacre during the Korea war [1], to this day neither the US nor South Korean government have really fully acknowledged or taken responsibility for what happened there, and just like with similar massacres of that kind: For the longest time survivors were persecuted for speaking out about what happened [2]. Decades of that breeds a culture of silent compliance.
There's also that whole politeness aspect: If you are a American, then no Japanese, Korean, or many Asian people in general will have small talk with you by opening a can of worms like "Your soldiers are/did occupying/bomb my country!", that would just be considered a very inappropriate thing to do.
It is -just- because voicing those opinions is dangerous though? My understanding is that Chinese aggression is a major regional concern, even for average people.
So is the resurgence of fascism in Japan and Japan's re-armament. Those are big concerns in Korea, definitely bigger threat than North Korea, and probably a bigger threat than China.
They have overwhelmingly voted for a president on a platform of signing a peace treaty with North Korea. The US veto over South Korean foreign policy options, the presence of US troops (and, more importantly, their refusal to transfer OPCON over the Korean military despite decades of promises) has been a major impediment to exercising the democratic will of the South Korean body politic.
The problem is that Korea is a vassal state and there is no path to expelling occupying troops without conflict, which nobody wants.
If you ask more specific and nuanced questions which don't jump to such drastic solutions, then you are quite likely to get different responses. eg. "Should the Korean government command the Korean army?" or "Should Korean voters be able to decide on the relationship between ROK and DRPK?" / "What role should occupying powers (eg. Japan, China, US) play in that?" or "What should be done about US officials guilty of atrocities (eg. Gwangju massacre) and other human rights offences (there's quite a lot of them) in South Korea?"
