On June 6, 2026, the official Truth Social account of United States President Donald Trump posted a piece of content that left millions of internet users around the world stunned.
Trump visualized himself as Naruto Uzumaki, the protagonist of Masashi Kishimoto’s manga series Naruto, complete with the iconic orange-black costume and the character’s signature shadow clone jutsu pose. The AI-generated content spread across digital platforms at extraordinary speed, drawing a range of reactions from the global anime fan community.
The irony spotlighted immediately by international media was sharp: Trump is the same president who, in 2025, announced 100-percent import tariffs on foreign films, framing overseas entertainment products as a national security threat. Yet it was a character born from Japanese cultural production that he chose as the avatar of his power.
This phenomenon is not merely political anecdote. It is the most naked demonstration yet of the soft power concept that Joseph Nye of Harvard University theorized. In his work Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics (2004), Nye defined soft power as a state’s ability to influence the behavior of other states through cultural attraction, political values, and the legitimacy of its foreign policy, rather than through coercion or material reward.
When the leader of the world’s most powerful nation voluntarily identifies with a Japanese fictional character, the question of how deeply Japan’s soft power has penetrated global consciousness finds its answer.
The Trump-Naruto episode does not stand alone. Months earlier, in the country with the world’s largest Muslim population and third-largest democracy, a pirate flag from the anime series One Piece had become the most viral symbol of civic resistance of 2025.
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From late July through August, students, activists, and ordinary citizens across Indonesia flew the Jolly Roger bearing the skull of straw-hat-wearing Monkey D. Luffy as an expression of protest against the policies of President Prabowo Subianto’s administration. The movement spread to multiple countries across Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas, making it one of the most significant pop-culture-identity protest waves in contemporary history.
Ismail Fahmi, founder of Indonesian social media monitoring agency Drone Emprit, captured the dynamic precisely when he observed that the flag was adopted because people wanted Indonesia to be better but could only express that through the symbols of One Piece.
The Indonesian government’s response only deepened the strategic communication failure. Coordinating Minister for Political and Security Affairs Budi Gunawan warned that flying the flag could result in criminal prosecution under a 2009 law on the desecration of the national flag. Farhan Rizqullah, a former foreign policy analyst assistant to the Indonesian House of Representatives, wrote on Medium that by treating a cartoon flag as a national security threat, the government had inadvertently validated the entire premise of the protest.
What should have been a routine governance response became evidence of how profoundly Japanese cultural heritage had seeped into the collective imagination of Indonesia’s younger generation, so deeply that it could function as a language of political resistance.
Both events bring us to a single pressing analytical question: why has Japan succeeded in building so powerful a cultural soft power ecosystem that its symbols can penetrate geographic, generational, and even ideological boundaries? And within that frame, where do South Korea and Indonesia stand?
The answer lies largely in policy consistency and industrial maturity. According to Parrot Analytics data, the anime sector generated global revenue of USD 19.8 billion in 2023, with the overseas market surpassing domestic earnings for the first time, a gap that widened dramatically into 2024.
More than an economic figure, anime has transformed into what scholars of Japanese soft power describe as a diffuse form of influence that operates at the popular level rather than solely at the policy tier. The Cool Japan program launched by Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry in 2012 was an institutional acknowledgment of a reality that had already taken shape at the grassroots: that manga and anime are the anchors of Japan’s identity in the eyes of the world.
The Naruto franchise alone has surpassed 250 million copies of manga sold globally, reflecting a depth of penetration that no conventional diplomatic instrument can easily replicate.
South Korea constructed its own distinct but no less ambitious path. Since former President Kim Dae-jung launched the Hallyu Industry Support Development Plan in 1998 as a response to the Asian financial crisis, the government’s cultural industry budget rose from USD 14 million to USD 84 million in just three years.
Data from the Korea Creative Content Agency (KOCCA, 2023) shows that South Korea’s cultural content exports, spanning music, audiovisual, gaming, animation, and webtoon, reached USD 12.4 billion in 2023, a 6.6-percent increase from the previous year.
K-pop and K-drama serve as its primary locomotives. Some analysts, however, offer a critical note worth considering. A piece published in East Asia Forum in March 2026 questioned whether Hallyu truly constitutes soft power in Nye’s sense, or whether it more accurately resembles brand equity, a powerful commercial reputation that does not automatically translate into political-preference influence.
This argument reinforces the understanding that cultural soft power and diplomatic soft power are related but not identical. South Korea excels at the former; whether that influence is sufficient to shape other states’ behavior remains an open question.
The most striking contrast emerges when we turn to Indonesia. The country is a massive consumer market for East Asian cultural products, yet has not established itself as a significant producer of global IP. Indonesia’s creative economy contributed over Rp 1,500 trillion to GDP and absorbed 26.5 million workers by the end of 2024, making it one of the economy’s most consequential pillars.
One encouraging signal came from the cinema: in April 2025, the Indonesian animated film Jumbo, produced by Visinema Studios, became the highest-grossing animation in Southeast Asian history, surpassing USD 23 million in domestic box office receipts and toppling Frozen 2 as the most-watched animated film ever released in Indonesia. Yet a single film, however proud a milestone, does not constitute a sustainable IP ecosystem.
In the digital space, there are more measurable grounds for optimism. Kisai Entertainment, an Indonesian webtoon studio, secured USD 1 million in funding from Japanese webtoon company Sorajima in late 2024, marking international confidence in local creators.
Meanwhile, data compiled by the Directorate General of Intellectual Property (DJKI) show that IP filings in Indonesia surged from 74,893 in 2015 to 339,304 in 2024, an average annual growth rate of 18.5 percent. These figures reflect substantial potential, but one that still requires strategic conversion into IP capable of reaching global markets.
Indonesia’s structural challenges in building national soft IP spring from two intertwined sources. First, the absence of a long-term IP development policy as consistent as Japan’s Cool Japan or Korea’s Hallyu Support Plan. The establishment of a standalone Ministry of Creative Economy in November 2024 under the Red-White Cabinet is a significant institutional step, but its budget capacity and its strategic orientation toward developing export-facing IP remain to be demonstrated.
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Second, the intellectual property protection infrastructure remains fragile. The USTR Special 301 Report has placed Indonesia on its Priority Watch List for weak enforcement against piracy and counterfeiting, particularly in the digital domain. Without robust IP protection, local creators face distorted incentives to invest in developing large-scale original characters and franchises.
What can Indonesia learn from the Trump-Naruto episode and the One Piece movement? The first lesson is paradoxical: the most powerful soft power grows not from state propaganda but from the authentic resonance between fictional narrative and universal human experience.
Naruto Uzumaki is a character about a person rejected by society striving to prove himself. One Piece is an epic about freedom, adventure, and resistance to arbitrary power. Both speak directly to human conditions that transcend language and nationality. Indonesia, with its wealth of mythology, cultural plurality, and depth of local narrative, holds raw material no less rich for creating characters with comparable resonance.
The second lesson is strategic. Neither Japan nor South Korea relied solely on individual creative talent; they built ecosystems, that is, interlocking structures of industry, regulation, financing, and cultural diplomacy. Indonesia needs to move from a project logic toward an ecosystem logic: from a single landmark film toward a sustainable franchise, from one talented studio toward an integrated industry network.
Only through that architecture might there come a day when a world leader visualizes themselves as an Indonesian character, and in that irony would reside the most tangible proof of a nation’s cultural power.
*The views presented in this article are the authors’ own and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Diplomatic Insight.
Darynaufal Mulyaman
Darynaufal Mulyaman is an Assistant Professor at Universitas Kristen Indonesia, Jakarta, specializing in Soft Power and Asia Pacific political-economy related issues.He can be reached atdarynaufal@uki.ac.id