Our Dreams Don’t Die: From One Piece to Indonesia’s Streets

By Asmit Mishra

---

Indonesia has once again been swept into waves of mass protest. In recent weeks, students and workers have filled the streets, furious at new policies that weaken labor protections and hand even more power to corporations. It is the latest flashpoint in a cycle of unrest that has repeated itself for years — anger at corruption, economic inequality, and a government that seems deaf to its people. From the fall of Suharto in 1998 to the Omnibus Law in 2020, protest has remained the language of dissent in Indonesia. And among the banners and chants that fill those streets today, another symbol has begun to appear: a flag not of the nation, but of fiction — the Jolly Roger of the Straw Hat Pirates from One Piece.

At first glance, it might seem almost absurd. An anime pirate flag fluttering in the midst of tear gas and riot shields? Yet it makes a strange kind of sense. One Piece, with its sprawling story of outlaws who refuse to bow to unjust authority, has become one of the most widely beloved piece of fiction in the world. For an entire generation, Luffy and his crew are not just characters on a page — they are avatars of freedom, loyalty, and defiance in a world where power is stacked against the weak. Carrying that flag into the streets wasn’t cosplay. It was a declaration: if the state won’t protect us, then we’ll march under our own banner.

The choice of the Straw Hat emblem was no accident. Pirates in One Piece aren’t painted as the villains the state claims them to be. They’re wanderers, dreamers, and rebels who carve out their own paths against corrupt hierarchies and oppressive systems. In Indonesia, where the government often seems more interested in serving investors than its citizens, that parallel feels painfully sharp. To wave the Jolly Roger in Jakarta was to say: we refuse to be defined by your laws, your compromises, your authority. We will define ourselves.

And the more the state tried to suppress that image, the stronger it became. Authorities took down banners, police confiscated flags, yet the emblem kept returning, printed, painted, scribbled, and shared online. Every attempt to erase it only confirmed what protesters already knew — that power is terrified of symbols it cannot control. National flags belong to governments. Party banners belong to politicians. But the Straw Hat flag belongs to no one and everyone. That is precisely what makes it dangerous to those in power.

Indonesia’s protesters are not alone in this strategy; the Straw Hat flag has also been raised by passionate youth demonstrators in Nepal, the Philippines, France, and beyond, uniting global movements under a shared symbol of resistance. Around the world, resistance has borrowed from fiction to find a language the state cannot easily neutralize. Guy Fawkes masks from V for Vendetta turned into a global shorthand for resistance during Occupy and the Hong Kong protests. The three-finger salute from The Hunger Games became a rallying gesture in Myanmar and Thailand. These cultural artifacts cut across language and class, creating symbols that are instantly recognizable and emotionally charged. The Jolly Roger of the Straw Hat Pirates now joins this lineage — a flag drawn in ink and imagination that found new life in the smoke of tear gas.

What makes the Indonesian case striking is how it reshapes the question of legitimacy. The national flag is supposed to represent the people, but when the people no longer feel seen, they invent their own emblems. The Straw Hat flag was never designed for our world’s politics, yet it fits perfectly into them. Eiichiro Oda may have laced One Piece with themes of justice, freedom, and defiance, but he likely never imagined his creation fluttering over real crowds demanding accountability. And yet here it is: a cartoon pirate crew turned into the face of a nation’s resistance.

In this way, the Straw Hat flag carries a double defiance. It resists the state by rejecting its symbols, and it resists cynicism by insisting that imagination still matters. To carry Luffy’s Jolly Roger is to believe that dreams — even fictional ones — have power. It’s to insist that another world is possible, even if the state insists otherwise. And perhaps that’s what frightens those in power the most: not the protesters themselves, but the idea that their rebellion is bound to something larger than the here and now, something impossible to fully crush.

A flag born in manga panels and animated seas became a weapon of the streets. Fiction turned into protest. Imagination became resistance. In Indonesia, as in so many places, rebellion needs no permission. Sometimes, all it needs is a symbol bold enough to remind people that authority is never absolute — and that even the wildest of dreams can become a rallying cry.