Today Northeast Asia faces unprecedented new types of crises. China's opening has brought incredible wealth, but at the same time, it has created huge environmental and social disruption. In the midst of serious problems of aging and decreasing population, Japan is suffering from the trauma of the 2011 triple disaster and its aftermath. North Korea remains one of the world's poorest and least free countries. In South Korea, rapid economic growth and subsequent efforts of democratization are overshadowed by serious political distrust and social unrest.

Despite these new crises of life, none of the formal institutions of politics – whether local, national or international – seems able to address them. Of course, we still need to know why the official political institutions have not been properly responding to the recently emerging crises. However, the main interest of this book lies in a different direction. Instead of exploring the causes of the failure of the formal responses, the authors rather pay attention to what ideas and actions people facing these crises have voluntarily conceived and practiced. This turn of the question is very timely and important. Indeed, it is time to discuss how life, which has so far been pursued in a specific imagination of modernization, has made our lives both miserable and painful, and what we should do to solve these problems beyond the existing epistemological framework and imagination of modernity. The book provides a wealth of examples and insights that encompass the ideas and experiences of historians, anthropologists and on-site activists as well as those interested in the life crisis, everyday politics, and trends in civic movements in Northeast Asia.

Each chapter of the book vividly portrays how in a situation when no official settlement is made, people in Northeast Asia have sought change in their everyday lives through autonomous collective practices. In Chapter 1, Sho introduces pre-war farmers in Hokkaido who built an experimental, cooperative community by imaging modernity in a different way. They dreamt of free transnational and non-state relations among people around the world. In Chapter 2, Ou addresses a deep-rooted problem in China's rural reconstruction movement in which politics has not only been an obstacle to its success but a key factor contributing to its failure. Similar to the Maoist communes, eventually destroyed by politics such as intense class struggle and frequent political movement, the Bishan Commune, founded by the author, is now under pressure to resolve sensitive relations with local politics. Morris-Suzuki, one of the editors and the author of Chapter 3, discusses the survival of the pre-war critical thinking of early twentieth-century Japan in the countryside today. Although the Saku region's grassroots movement enjoys success in terms of sustainability, it also faces challenges such as the problem of member reproduction and domestic far-right politics.

In Chapter 4, Avenell explores how Japanese environmentalists gradually obtained reflexive modern identity as they engaged with transnational activism in the 1970s. While reconceptualizing environmental problems beyond national boundaries, they organized their movements away from state-led developmental modernism. In Chapter 5, Shoko describes how two recent catastrophes in Japan – Minamata disease and the triple disaster of 11 March 2011 – have contributed to the reemergence of the local tradition of animism as local people have become concerned with the relationship among life, nature, and soul. Brinowski demonstrates in Chapter 6 that those who were exposed to radiation at Fukushima Daiichi face similar problems as do irregular workers who have worked at power plants over last forty years. In the growth-centered and neoliberal governance where the state prioritizes the profit of private corporations, both irregular workers and ordinary citizens are being alienated from planetary commons such as food, land, community, history, and nature in this region.

Meanwhile, looking at two antagonistic groups of social movements after the sinking of the Sewol ferry in 2014, Cho, the author of Chapter 7, points out that today young Korean people cannot find a reliable place to plan their future and are driven to live like refugees in survival politics. But she predicts that this refugee identity may be able to allow today's youth to have an emancipatory vision of global catastrophes beyond the national framework of citizenship. In Chapter 8, Krischer argues from the case of Wooferten artistic practices in Hong Kong that today's collaborative practices of artists and local residents create a new vision of life. She also discovers that informal politics cannot be well explained by the existing dichotomic criteria of movements – success or failure. In Chapter 9, the author and second editor Soh demonstrates how the officially banned marketization takes place in North Korea as a form of the politics from below. It operates in the cooperative and contentious relationship between law-implementing officials and ordinary people who engage in trade, which implies the existence of compliance even in the totalitarian state. In Chapter 10, the Hope Institute introduces examples of varied forms of social innovation in Asia. It shows that despite critical constraints in Asia such as “weak governance,” limited resources and lack of democracy, social innovation projects have substantially contributed to solving social problems in this region.

None of all the practices mentioned above is overtly “political,” but as Morris-Suzuki points out, they are quietly transforming aspects of life in Northeast Asia today. They are “informal life politics” because these actions and movements are carried out in everyday life, and they are also collective acts to survive in the absence or serious lack of institutional politics. The places and ways in which these voluntary practices are conducted are various. They take place in rural and urban areas, and in some cases, across regional boundaries and borders through networks.

The cases of informal life politics in this book shed light on some fundamental dilemmas of twenty-first-century political life in Northeast Asia. In 1989, Francis Fukuyama declared that liberal democracy is the end of history that solves all the flaws and irrationalities of the existing system. However, as we have seen, Northeast Asia is not moving toward embracing liberal democracy altogether, nor even in the countries that have embraced liberal democracy can a democratic political system solve the crises people face today. On the contrary, democracy keeps citizens’ lives more isolated and distressed amid increasingly large amounts of capital and elite collusion. In a world dominated by the media, the voting is no more than a ridiculous ritual that does not represent citizens’ positions but alienates them. In this changing political environment, citizens feel the need to solve their problems themselves, and often find better solutions through such direct actions and organizations.

This book seems to leave us with two, seemingly contradictory, questions. First, in order to solve the crises facing us today, what kind of relationship should informal life politics have with the formal institution of politics? As some authors suggest, despite many benefits and positive implications, informal life politics cannot be a complete solution to today's crises in Northeast Asia. The role of institutional politics at the local, national, and global level is still necessary and important to address these problems. As seen in some examples, however, the relationship between the two areas is rarely cooperative and at best indifferent. More often than not, attempts at informal life politics have been hampered or even frustrated by official politics because of the instability of the system, authoritarian political culture, and collusion between capital and bureaucrats and so on. How should we then rebuild the relationship between these two areas of politics to better resolve the crises?

Secondly, going one step further, the discussion in the book leads to the question of why informal life politics, which has been tried from the past up to the present, cannot still be a complete solution to the crises that threaten people's daily lives. Beyond psychological support, what specific strategies have the activities and movements through transnational networks used to solve the problems, different from those of the existing political system? And if collective responses through such transnational networks still do not exert enough influence in changing situations, why is that? Perhaps, to make the authors’ efforts more socially meaningful, we should reconceptualize the official political institutions, for example, the state. If the nation-state formed according to the logic of developmental modernism no longer serves to solve the important problems of people's daily life in Northeast Asia, shouldn't its role be reduced merely to a legal or institutional one?