On Aug. 29, hundreds of protesters marched to the Jakarta headquarters of the Mobile Brigade Corps, a paramilitary arm of the Indonesian National Police. They were gathered to demand justice for Affan Kurniawan, a 21-year-old delivery driver who was run over by a tactical vehicle the day before while participating in another demonstration. An image by a Reuters photojournalist shows the protesters in front of the government building after dusk, the flames of burning barricades reflected on their motorcycle helmets. As far as protests go, it’s a familiar and fairly conventional scene — except, perhaps, for one inconspicuous detail. In the top left corner of the photograph, barely in frame, a protester can be seen holding a flag with a crudely drawn skull and a straw hat.
This is not a state emblem or party sigil. It’s the Jolly Roger of Monkey D. Luffy, the protagonist of the pirate-themed anime and manga series “One Piece.” Strange as it may sound, this flag has become a popular symbol of anti-government sentiment throughout Indonesia. Reportedly, it was first used by truckers protesting transportation reforms, only to be picked up by other parts of the population when news broke that parliament had proposed to increase housing subsidies for its already well-compensated members — a tough sell in a country where an estimated 40% of the annual national budget is lost to corruption. As photos and videos of people waving the “One Piece” flag went viral on social media, government officials warned of “criminal consequences” for anyone who replaced the national banner with cartoon skulls and straw hats.
This is not the first time Japanese media has become embedded in the political culture of another country. In recent years, anime and manga have played a prominent role in protest movements across the world, from East Asia to South America. By and large, protesters draw inspiration from them for the same reasons they reference film, TV, video games and music: to mobilize and legitimize the causes they fight for. Compared to other types of media, it could be argued that anime and manga are particularly effective forms of protest due to their unique story tropes, close connection to online discourse and cross-cultural, decentralized fandoms. Moreover, in an age when authoritarianism is on the rise and civil liberties are retreating, global franchises like “One Piece” represent spaces of resistance beyond government control.
The ways anime and manga have been used in protests are as varied as the Japanese media landscape itself. In 2020, demonstrations in Thailand — the largest in recent history — used the children’s anime series “Hamtaro” to call for the dissolution of parliament. Carrying plushies in the image of the titular orange hamster and singing a politically charged parody of the series’ theme song, they ran circles around government buildings and other public spaces.
The year before, protests against austerity in Chile saw people carrying signs referencing well-known series like “Naruto” and “Attack on Titan.” One activist who took to the streets dressed as Pikachu, the mascot of the “Pokemon” franchise, turned into a social media sensation. Braving pepper spray and water cannons, she was nicknamed “Tia Pikachu” or “Aunt Pikachu,” and ended up elected to Chile’s Constitutional Convention.
Perhaps the most extensive and well-documented use of anime and manga for political purposes took place in Hong Kong during the Anti-Extradition Bill Movement of 2019-2020. Responding to legislation that compromised the city’s autonomy from mainland China and the Chinese Communist Party, protesters created and distributed images that referenced a variety of Japanese media, from classics like “Doraemon,” “Neon Genesis Evangelion” and Studio Ghibli’s “My Neighbor Totoro” to contemporary hits like “Psycho Pass” and “Demon Slayer.” Some of these images depicted characters holding yellow umbrellas — a symbol of peaceful resistance that originated during the Umbrella Movement of 2014, when Hong Kongers protested Beijing’s interference in local elections. Others inserted protesters into iconic scenes, implicitly likening their real-life struggles to the epic quests of their fictional heroes.
Why have anime and manga — frequently associated with escapism — become tools of rebellion and resistance? One answer concerns their humanitarian themes. Both forms of media emerged after World War II, when Japanese civil society sought to distance itself from its imperial, totalitarian past, and move toward a peaceful, democratic future. These sentiments were reflected in the country’s cultural sphere. As Matt Alt, a translator and author of “Pure Invention: How Japan’s Pop Culture Conquered the World,” puts it, anime and manga are all about freedom — “of expression, and everything else.” Their stories, he tells New Lines, “tend to be gleefully distrustful of authority, advocating free thinking and self-actualization, featuring wildly diverse casts, and taking great joy in empowering the weak, the outsiders, the weirdos, the people who don’t fit in.”
This is certainly true of “One Piece,” whose main characters — Luffy and his crew, the Straw Hat Pirates — sail from island to island, liberating inhabitants from their tyrannical rulers. “They are fighting against the powerful on behalf of the weak,” says Mateja Kovacic, an associate professor of Asian studies at Yonsei University in South Korea, who researched the impact of anime and manga on the Anti-Extradition Bill Movement. “That’s what made ‘One Piece’ popular among Hong Kong protesters, too. On the one hand, there’s this systemic abuse of power by the elites, and on the other, a group of misfits brought together by the idea of following their own moral compass.”
The inspirational power of stories like “One Piece” should not be underestimated. As Henry Jenkins, a seasoned media scholar at the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism (USC Annenberg) and author of “Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide,” tells New Lines, heroic narratives from popular media often surface in the political sphere because they provide young people with the optimism, resilience and sense of empowerment they need to participate in civic life.
This dynamic, it’s worth noting, is not unique to anime and manga. The Hong Kong protests referenced martial artist Bruce Lee as much as they did “Doraemon” or “Sailor Moon.” American protesters frequently incorporate imagery from live-action Hollywood films like “The Hunger Games” and “V for Vendetta.” And in 2010, Palestinian activists in the West Bank dressed up as Na’vi from James Cameron’s “Avatar” to protest Israel’s apartheid regime. Nor is the politicization of popular media unique to the 21st century: Black civil rights leaders referenced the Book of Exodus, while the Founding Fathers drew inspiration from Greco-Roman mythology.
That’s not to say all forms of media are identical. Generally, communities of anime and manga fans, known as “otakus,” are not only characterized by the degree to which they turn their interests into an identity and lifestyle, but also by what Jenkins has called a “participatory culture” — one in which fans don’t consume so much as co-create, imbuing media with their own meaning through cosplay, fan fiction or protests. The parasocial bonds otakus form with their favorite franchises are often so strong that they shape their characters and guide their actions.
Liam, an Australian YouTuber who operates a “One Piece” fan channel with 1.28 million subscribers called “Grand Line Review,” does not think the series has any inherent political leanings. “I’ve seen images of Luffy holding a Palestinian flag,” he tells New Lines, “and I’ve seen the same image photoshopped with an Israeli flag.” Still, he does not deny the influence a property like “One Piece” can have over its fans: “Characters like Luffy and Zoro who constantly showed me that I could be better than I am. And, in a weird way, I often live life not wanting to disappoint those fictional pirates.”
Manga, anime and the fan communities built around them are also uniquely intertwined with the rise of the internet and online communication. Both inside and outside Japan, otakus were among the first to congregate on message boards, web forums and social media platforms, and their participatory culture spurred the invention and popularization of memes, which have since emerged as powerful political weapons in their own right. Unlike film, TV, games and music, where online fandoms are fragmented into genres, artists and languages, anime and manga communities — though certainly segmented — remain plugged into a larger, interconnected, cross-cultural network.
All of these qualities combine to make anime and manga uniquely effective channels of transnational communication — an effectiveness illustrated by social media’s overwhelmingly positive response to news of Indonesian protesters using the “One Piece” flag. Here, manga and anime not only raise awareness for a political cause, but also generate sympathy: Someone who knows nothing about Indonesian society need only see the skull and straw hat to form a rudimentary impression of what the protests are about and which of the two parties deserves their support. “We’re with Luffy,” the flag says. “We’re the good guys.”
Sangita Shresthova, an associate research professor of communication at USC Annenberg, expects the politicization of manga, anime and other popular media to increase as more and more democracies slide toward authoritarianism and tolerance for opposition and disobedience dissipates. “Pop culture exists in this in-between stage,” she tells New Lines. “Is it political? Is it not political?”
In regimes where explicit criticism of the state or its leaders is punished harshly, symbols like the “One Piece” flag provide protesters with an air of plausible deniability. “It’s like in Czechoslovakia under communism. There, pop culture was also the arena where protests took place. There’s a reason why Václav Havel was a playwright: There was no space for him to be a political actor. It was all about reading in between the lines, and that’s similar to what we see in Indonesia and other places today.”
More than just a practical necessity, protesting through pop culture reveals the limits of political repression in a globalized, digitized world. “All over the planet,” Jenkins says, “governments are feeling threatened by global media” because it allows people to “escape the parochialism of their own cultures.” Looking at Indonesia, he suspects authorities would have had an easier time containing civil unrest if protesters rallied behind a symbol from Indonesian media as opposed to a transnational phenomenon like “One Piece.” “Because it’s not Indonesian, it’s not under the government’s control, and that’s part of what makes it liberatory.”
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