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This article is part of the special issue Creative Labor in East Asia. By exploring specific politico-economic and institutional, conditions promoting actually existing precarity in Korean digital game labor, this study aims to examine how the industrial and institutional conditions of precarity affect digital game workers' subjectivity. Under this theoretical and empirical consideration, the study first delineates how the rapid industrial transition to the mobile game market happens in relation to the Korean government's deregulation policy on that particular market. It then scrutinizes the ways in which this industrial shift deepens labor precarity, promotes degradation of skills, and ultimately fragments workers in the digital game industry. Based on this structural analysis, it argues that the fragmented industrial structure of the digital game industry in Korea not only actually fosters contrasting labor subjectivities but also promotes fragmented resistances among Korean digital game workers. By critically evaluating both possibilities and limitations of the recent firm-centered union movements created by digital game workers, the study ultimately concludes that finding a way to connect organized unions to unorganized freelance workers is absolutely necessary to actually transform "precarity" into "solidarity." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Facing both neoliberalism and the persisting legacies of developmentalism, many South Korean cities continue to subscribe to strong growth-first ideologies, despite their deindustrialization and aging populations. The growth orientation in cities, however, is far from being limited to South Korea. In fact, the recently emerging discourse on urban shrinkage, which has been West-centric so far, is questioning the bias toward growth in cities, and calling for a paradigm shift. This article brings together the literatures on shrinking cities and urban politics to illustrate how an East Asian city, transforming from a developmentalist to an entrepreneurial city, could seek a development alternative to the one based on the neoliberal competition for capital. Specifically, it examines the case of Totatoga, a culture-led urban revitalization project in a declining, old commercial district of Busan. It explains how a new kind of state–society collaboration opportunely explored a development path other than growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Environmental aid has become a major component of development aid. We analyzed the contingent characters of environmental aid of Japan and South Korea using the definition of Williams, which regards aid policy as donor driven and autobiographical of the donor agencies and societies from which they sprang. Both Japan and South Korea consider environmental aid as an important tool of their diplomacy. A combination of a moral obligation and domestic, international, political, and economic interests underpin both countries’ environmental aid policy. Seen from the stated policies and practices, both countries use accounts of their past as once-developing countries trying to catch up in their aid narrative. In this manner, the environmental aid of Japan and South Korea is autobiographic, reflecting their interpretation of their own development history and position in global politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multiculturalism in the Northeastern Asian states of Japan, South Korea, China and Taiwan as well as the members of ASEAN are interesting case studies in how states manage migration policy and create migrant policy. Examining their migration practices, we can understand East Asian perspectives on multiculturalism employing traditional migration frameworks revolving around control and management of entry of migrants, state-building and ethnocentric rationale for/or against pro-migrant policies. This review article will delineate how different states in the region construct migrant policies in line with their state’s interests, which include domestic, regional and international interests by employing the below nine articles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]