POP CULTURE AS POLITICAL IDENTITY
The “One Piece Jolly Roger” and Shared Political Identity in Gen Z’s Asian Spring
In August and September 2025, Gen Z–led protests erupted across Indonesia, Nepal, and the Philippines. Across all three movements, one unexpected symbol appeared: the One Piece Jolly Roger. My 29-page International Studies senior capstone examined how East Asian pop culture imagery became a shared political language across national borders. Building on prior scholarship, I expanded an existing framework that identified three political functions of the flag in Indonesia and applied it comparatively to Nepal and the Philippines.
To support this analysis, I conducted multi-platform social listening using Google Trends and Talkwalker. I constructed Boolean queries linking “One Piece flag” with protest-related terms and country names to isolate political usage of the symbol. Between May and November 2025, the query returned over 172,000 posts and an estimated sixty-three billion impressions, with conversation spikes aligning with major protest escalations. The data demonstrated how the symbol traveled from fandom spaces into transnational political discourse.
The research found that the Jolly Roger served three interconnected purposes: it created a shared political identity among youth, provided a universally recognizable and remixable visual language, and allowed activists to express nonviolent political imagination rooted in collective futures. By combining cultural theory with empirical digital analysis, the project positioned pop culture not as entertainment but as political infrastructure shaping how a generation understands resistance, solidarity, and change.
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