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This study examines the mobilization of the Far Right in Korea and Japan in the 2000s and probes how and why the actors and political claims of East Asian extremists differ from their counterparts in Europe and North America. The Far Right forces in Korea and Japan are politically regressive in glorifying the authoritarian or colonial past and cling to unchanging ideological claims from the postwar decades in their current targeting of old-time, internal “others.” This divergence is explained by the United States–led Cold War geopolitics in Asia, under which Far Right elites were fortified in postwar Japan and Korea. The Cold War that has not ended in Asia as opposed to Europe or North America further allows the institutional sustainability of the radical Right and the political resonance of its old ideology of anticommunism and colonial racism. As such, democratic politics in East Asia is predicated on Cold War undercurrents.

Under rising insecurity and precarity in the neoliberal labor market, Korean workers have protested mass job cuts and deteriorating working conditions. Although their grievances originate from the regions and workplaces where they are employed or laid off, the protest sites often move to major political landmarks in Seoul, the nation’s capital, with demands for political redress. These labor protests in the capital demonstrate two distinctive features of Korean labor movements in the 2000s: protests go on for a protracted period of time with few tangible results and take extreme forms of resistance. Approaching Seoul as a site of contentious politics, this study analyses the mutual nexus between labor protests and urban spaces with cases that appropriate various sites, such as Kwanghwamun (Gwanghwamun) Square, the Blue House, and the National Assembly, involving diverse tactics like long-term camp-ins, sambo ilbae (삼보일배) marches, and the occupation of structurally perilous structures. It examines which layers of inequality and injustice in the labor market, or in Korean society at large, are articulated through protest methods that spatially engage with specific urban locations in Seoul. With this investigation, the paper argues that the labor movement practices novel repertoires of resistance to neoliberal precarity by choosing the urban sites with metaphoric significance and by publicly displaying bodily torment. These new forms of contention, in turn, redefine the sense and political implication of the protest site and make the space part of the new protest repertoire.

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This essay introduces four articles that form a special issue of Politics & Society titled “Right-Wing Activism in Asia: Cold War Legacies, Geopolitics, and Democratic Erosion.” The articles focus on Japan, South Korea, and Thailand. These three Asian countries present important cases to generate critical comparative insights about the patterns of Far Right mobilization, for their geopolitical histories provide common ground while institutional variations set distinctive conditions. Most importantly, all of them were shaped by the particularly sharp conflicts of the Cold War in the region, and the articles in this issue demonstrate how this legacy has generated illiberal conditions in these countries today.