Flag of freedom: The anime pirate symbol at the Jantar Mantar protests

From Jakarta to Jantar Mantar, One Piece's Straw Hat Pirates have become an unlikely protest symbol. Their journey says as much about GenZ as it does about politics

It started with a flag fluttering alongside the tricolour.

 

It was not the kind of flag you expect to see at a student protest. Black, emblazoned with a grinning skull in a straw hat, it belonged to the Straw Hat Pirates from One Piece. Other anime appeared, too. One placard recast Jujutsu Kaisen's Gojo Satoru as the teacher shielding students from “incompetent higher-ups”. Here and there, Luffy's trademark straw hat appeared in the crowd. Yet it was One Piece that lingered. The Straw Hat. The Jolly Roger. Again and again.

 

Somewhere between portraits of Dr B R Ambedkar and Mahatma Gandhi, copies of the Constitution and slogans demanding justice, Eiichiro Oda's pirates had found a place at Jantar Mantar. One student steadied the Jolly Roger as another raised a copy of the Constitution. The juxtaposition should have felt incongruous. Instead, it barely seemed to register. Nothing about that combination should have made immediate sense. Protest movements usually inherit their symbols from history, not fiction.   Yet nobody seemed to find the pirate flag out of place. And it wasn’t unique to Jantar Mantar either. Over the past few years, the Straw Hat Pirates’ Jolly Roger has surfaced at youth-led protests across Asia. It flew above Indonesia’s 2019 student demonstrations against proposed revisions to the criminal code, reappeared during the country's 2025 ‘Dark Indonesia’ protests against budget cuts and governance, surfaced during Nepal’s student-led demonstrations, and became part of the visual landscape of Thailand’s youth-led pro-democracy movement. Different countries. Different grievances. But the same pirate flag.

 

 

The choice was curious. The symbols of protest movements are usually forged through wars, revolutions and social movements before coming to represent something larger than themselves. This one was borrowed from fiction. There was no obvious reason why a pirate crew imagined by a Japanese manga artist should resonate with students protesting vastly different political realities. It wasn't just that the flag had travelled. It was that it had arrived carrying meaning.  On the face of it, One Piece is an unlikely candidate for political symbolism. It follows Monkey D Luffy, an exuberant pirate with a body made of rubber, and his crew, as they sail in search of the legendary treasure known as the One Piece. There are sea monsters, talking skeletons, reindeer doctors, cyborgs and islands in the sky. Nothing about it appears designed for the language of protest. And yet, somewhere along the way, the adventure stopped being just an adventure. 

The Straw Hat Pirates' Jolly Roger at an 'ICE Out' protest Minnesota, US | Photo: Reuters

Few works of fiction have travelled as far. First serialised in 1997, One Piece has sold over 500 million copies worldwide, making it the best-selling manga series in history. Its anime adaptation has run for more than 1,100 episodes, while Netflix's live-action adaptation introduced the story to audiences well beyond anime fandom.

 

Long before the Straw Hat Pirates reached Jantar Mantar, anime had been woven into the internet's cultural vocabulary. Scenes from Death Note and Attack on Titan are routinely repurposed into memes about surveillance, authoritarianism and resistance. Dialogue from Jujutsu Kaisen and Naruto finds its way into protest reels and Instagram edits, stripped from its original context and given new meaning by the moment. Fictional characters become shorthand for real emotions, real frustrations and real political events. 

Protestors hold a banner depicting the Straw Hat Pirates' Jolly Roger flag from the series One Piece during a protest demanding an audit of Bolivia's presidential runoff results after preliminary counts showed centrist senator Rodrigo Paz of the Christian Democratic Party (PDC) defeating former President Jorge "Tuto" Quiroga in La Paz, Bolivia | Photo: Reuters

For a generation raised online, this isn’t unusual. Pop culture is no longer something consumed and left behind; it is one of the ways people make sense of the world. Entire conversations unfold through memes, GIFs, reaction images and fictional characters. Nobody says, “I’m frustrated with authority”. They post Gojo. Nobody writes an essay on moral ambiguity. They invoke Light Yagami. Politics was never going to remain untouched.

 

But that still doesn't explain why one pirate crew, rather than hundreds of other fictional worlds, should keep resurfacing at protests. The internet can make almost anything go viral. It rarely makes symbols endure. Yet among dozens of anime that circulate through this shared cultural vocabulary, one story keeps returning with unusual consistency. The Straw Hat Pirates' Jolly Roger appears not merely as a meme or a passing reference, but as an emblem in its own right. From Jakarta to Kathmandu to New Delhi, it has outlived trends, algorithms and viral moments.

Demonstrators carry a Mexican flag, a black and white version of a Mexican flag and a One Piece flag as riot control agents are sprayed on them during a protest against insecurity and corruption in the country, in Mexico City, Mexico | Photo: Reuters

Again and again, the Straw Hats arrive at islands where ordinary people live under rulers who wield power without accountability. Sometimes they are kings. Sometimes pirates. Sometimes they are backed by the World Government itself. The setting changes. The conflict rarely does. Luffy does not arrive as a revolutionary or a reformer. He isn’t interested in changing systems or advancing an ideology. He simply refuses to accept a world in which power goes unquestioned. By the time he leaves, kingdoms have been liberated, tyrants have fallen, and ordinary people have reclaimed their agency.

 

Oda has long resisted the idea that One Piece is meant to deliver a political message. “I don’t put any messages in the manga I draw,” he said. “If I draw a story, the themes emerge all on their own... each reader is entirely free to decide what he or she takes away from the story.” 

A person holds a flag featuring a Malagasy version of the logo from the popular Japanese manga One Piece during a gathering along Independence Avenue, following the swearing-in of Colonel Michael Randrianirina as president the previous day, after youth-led protests ousted his predecessor, in Antananarivo, Madagascar | Photo: Reuters

Perhaps that refusal to prescribe meaning is precisely what has made the series so politically portable. Rather than telling readers what to think, One Piece asks what freedom, justice and authority mean to them. Readers in Indonesia, Nepal and India bring different histories, different grievances and different political realities to the same story. The answers change. The questions endure. That is why the same pirate flag can appear at protests across countries without ever representing the same cause.

 

When it fluttered alongside the tricolour, portraits and copies of the Constitution at Jantar Mantar, the pairing wasn’t as incongruous as it first appeared. The pirate flag hadn’t replaced those symbols. It had joined them. India’s political imagination remains rooted in the ideas of Ambedkar, Gandhi and Bhagat Singh. If they help us stay rooted in our history, characters like Luffy help a younger generation speak that history in the language of the present. The ideals may not have changed. The imagery has.

 

For GenZ, anime is no longer a niche hobby or an escape from reality. It is part of the cultural grammar through which they experience the world. A scene from Attack on Titan becomes a commentary on state power. Gojo Satoru’s dialogue is repurposed to mock authority. Within hours of a major political event, anime clips are remixed into Instagram Reels, acquiring meanings far removed from their original stories. 

A mural depicting a Jolly Roger from the popular Japanese anime and manga series 'One Piece' in West Java province, Indonesia, where students and activists in the world's third-largest democracy have put up the pirate sign used by "One Piece" character Monkey D. Luffy as a symbol of protest against several government policies ahead of the country's Independence Day on August 17 | Photo: Reuters

The internet didn’t replace political language. It expanded it. Protest, too, has become increasingly visual. Placards are no longer limited to slogans and political cartoons; they compete for attention in an internet-native ecosystem where an instantly recognisable image can travel faster than speech. A pirate flag or an anime character would carry meaning not because everyone has watched the series but because it is immediately legible to the communities most likely to amplify it online.

 

It was a political symbol born in the age of the algorithm, where the internet doesn't merely document movements but shapes how they look, how they are remembered and how they travel.

 

But that still leaves one question unanswered. The internet has produced thousands of viral characters and fleeting symbols. Why has Luffy endured?

 

Anime today is less a niche interest than a shared cultural language. Characters have escaped the boundaries of their own stories to become shorthand for ideas and experiences. Gojo embodies irreverence in the face of authority. Light Yagami is invoked whenever conversations turn to absolute power and moral ambiguity. References that once belonged to fandom now surface everywhere, from cricket memes to election commentary. Politics was perhaps always going to become part of that vocabulary. By the time students gathered at Jantar Mantar carrying the Straw Hat Pirates’ Jolly Roger, they weren’t introducing an unfamiliar symbol to a protest. They were bringing the language they already spoke online into the physical world. 

Yet language alone doesn't create enduring symbols. It only gives them a way to spread. Something else explains why, among countless fictional characters, Luffy keeps returning.

 

In a 2024 interview, Oda reflected that adulthood often comes with compromises and a gradual loss of freedom, while Luffy retains the instinctive freedom of a child, acting without being constrained by convention or expectations of others. It is a philosophy that sits at the heart of the series. Luffy does not dream of ruling kingdoms or wielding power. He simply wants to become the freest person on the seas.

 

That idea has proved remarkably portable. Freedom, in One Piece, is never an abstract political slogan. It is deeply personal: The freedom to choose one's own path, to challenge arbitrary authority, and to stand beside those denied that choice. Readers across countries and cultures inevitably bring their own experiences to that idea, finding different meanings in the same story. The politics may differ. The emotional impulse rarely does. That is what allows symbols to travel more easily than ideologies. It is also how symbols outgrow the stories that created them.  Every generation inherits its ideals. It also finds its own symbols through which to express them. The raised fist, Che Guevara’s portrait and the Guy Fawkes mask all emerged from specific historical moments before taking on lives far beyond them. Their power lies not in remaining tied to a single event, but in their ability to absorb new meanings with every generation that adopts them.

 

The Straw Hat Pirates’ Jolly Roger appears to be undergoing a similar transformation. It no longer belongs only to the world Eiichiro Oda imagined. Each time it appears at a protest, in a meme or on a placard, it gathers another layer of meaning. It is read differently in Jakarta from that in Kathmandu, and even more differently in New Delhi. Like all enduring symbols, it survives not because everyone agrees on what it means, but because different people keep finding themselves in it.

 

That evolution says as much about this generation as it does about One Piece. Earlier generations often found a shared political vocabulary through campuses, student organisations and mass movements. GenZ has grown up in communities built just as much around fandoms, gaming servers, Reddit threads and Instagram edits. Those spaces are rarely political in themselves, but they shape the references, humour and symbols through which young people interpret the world. By the time they step onto the streets, they are not borrowing from internet culture. They are speaking the language in which they came of age. 

The skull-and-straw hat pirate flag from the Japanese anime ‘One Piece’ has now become the emblem of Nepal’s anti-government protests. Mass demonstrations led largely by teenagers and young adults forced the prime minister to resign, while the army was deployed to guard key areas | Photo: Reuters

In the end, perhaps the most remarkable thing about the pirate flag at Jantar Mantar was that nobody seemed to find it remarkable at all. For those gathered there, the symbols belonged to different worlds, but they spoke to one another with surprising ease.

 

That is how cultures evolve. Every generation inherits its ideals and discovers a new language through which to express them. If Ambedkar, Gandhi and Bhagat Singh help us stay rooted in our history, characters like Luffy help a younger generation speak that history in the language of the present.

 

Maybe that is why the Straw Hat Pirates’ Jolly Roger keeps resurfacing in places Eiichiro Oda could never have imagined. It is no longer simply the emblem of a fictional pirate crew searching for treasure. Like all enduring symbols, it has begun to outgrow its creator, gathering new meanings with every generation that adopts it.

 

The pirate flag at Jantar Mantar was never asking anyone to become a pirate. It was asking a far simpler question, one every generation answers in its own language: What does freedom look like?