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RNZ News
6 hours ago
- RNZ News
Popular Japanese anime flag becomes symbol of Indonesia resistance
By Erwin Renaldi and Natasya Salim , ABC Radinal Muhtar paints the One Piece emblem on the back of his car to express his frustration with the government. Photo: ABC/Supplied The Indonesian government is clamping down on the display of a popular Japanese anime flag by frustrated youth, with some authorities claiming it could "divide" the nation. As the country prepares to celebrate Independence Day on 17 August, the emblem of the One Piece flag has been increasingly popping up on vehicles and outside homes. Social media users say they chose the Jolly Roger flag - featuring a skull wearing a straw hat, set above two crossed bones - as a sign of defiance, because it symbolised courage and rebellion against oppression. This week, President Prabowo Subianto acknowledged the display as an "expression of creativity", while the state secretary told local media that flying the flag was "OK", as long as people did not oppose the national flag. However, some authorities were more scathing of the One Piece flag. Political and Security Affairs Minister Budi Gunawan said the government would take "firm action", if there were any deliberate acts of flying the pirate flag on Indonesia's Independence Day. "There are criminal consequences for actions that violate the honour of the red-and-white [national] flag," he said. Meanwhile, Deputy House Speaker Sufmi Dasco Ahmad called it an attempt to "divide the unity of the nation". The One Piece fictional series tells a story of Monkey D Luffy and his pirate crew exploring a fantasy world in search of treasure. "Luffy and friends were pirates, who were looking for freedom and opposed the government who was immune from the law," Indonesian mural artist Radinal Muhtar told the ABC. "I think the One Piece plot has a lot of similarities with what's happening in Indonesia." Earlier this year, many Indonesians took to social media with the viral hashtag IndonesiaGelap or "dark Indonesia" to express their fear about the country's future. Many young people also expressed a desire to "run away" from the country and pursue a better life. Muhtar handpainted the Jolly Roger emblem on the back of his car to express his "disappointment". He said he thought it was "low-risk", compared to raising the flag. "This trend probably reflects people's concerns, because we're not doing well economically," he said. "It's hard to find a job and there are government policies that are harming the people." After seeing the One Piece flag flood her social media feed, Ika ordered one and planned to raise it at her sharehouse in the south of Jakarta. Ika - who did not want to publish her surname, due to safety concerns - said even though she never watched the anime series, she wanted to show solidarity with her generation. "We're struggling to find jobs, we can't afford housing and our future feels uncertain," she said. "Even though I'm afraid the police might come after me, this is just my way of expressing myself." The One Piece flag has been used in Indonesia to voice dissatisfaction with the government. Photo: ABC/Supplied Radinal Muhtar Local media reported that police interviewed people who flew the flag in several cities, including two in the Riau islands in western Indonesia. Hamam Wahyudi, a police officer in Tanjungpinang city in the Riau islands, told reporters the two people "violated the law and disrupted public order". "The residents said it was a form of disappointment toward the government, but it turned out they were just following the trend," he said. Wahyudi said they both signed a statement, saying that they would not repeat their actions. Similarly, police and military personnel visited a person's house in Tuban, on the northern coast of Java, to confiscate the flag and to question their motives. Bagong Suyanto, a sociologist from University of Airlangga, told the ABC the One Piece flag trend was a "massive movement", because it cut across social classes and age groups. "They all felt the government's policies marginalised their interests," he said. Professor Suyanto said displaying the pirate flag, including on social media, was a "form of creativity", but Indonesian authorities were overreacting by using a punitive approach and treating it as a violation of the law. Adhika Taufiq Wiracatra, who heads the One Piece fanbase called Nakama, said the trend misrepresented what the flag stood for and would negatively impact the anime series. "There are some people who are participating in this trend… and haven't read One Piece from the start," he said. "They don't know the true meaning behind it." Adhika Taufiq Wiracatra (front, third from left) is concerned the trend will have negative implications for the series. Photo: ABC/Supplied Wiracatra said the flag's use in the series occurred, when the pirates faced authorities who stood between them and their goals, and simply served as a reminder not to give up. He warned his members about joining the trend and the risks if they decided to proceed. "What was done by Mugiwara Pirates in One Piece was to go on an adventure with friends and achieve their dreams," he said. Indonesia is not the only country where younger generations have used pop culture references to vent their frustration with the government. Students in Thailand used the Hunger Games franchise's three-finger salute to criticise the monarchy in 2020. They also participated in Harry Potter dress-ups to make a point about 'He Who Shall Not be Named' - which was a thinly veiled reference to the Thai king. Protesters hold up the three-finger salute during a demonstration in Bangkok. Photo: JACK TAYLOR Thai activists also used Japanese cartoon hamster Hamtaro to protest the government and monarchy. Professor Suyanto said these references were a creative and safer way for the millennial generation to protest against state authority and express criticism. "I see it as effective… their voices became louder and many political elites have responded, though whether [their] response meets the public expectations is another matter. "They don't need to take to the streets, confront authorities or face police batons." - ABC
RNZ News
12 hours ago
- RNZ News
Japan used to be tech giant. Why is it stuck with fax machines, ink stamps?
Is Japan finally done with the fax machine? Photo: 123RF By Jessie Yeung, CNN When you think of Tokyo, you might think of neon-lit skyscrapers and its world-famous bullet-train system, or films like Akira and Ghost in the Shell that depict a futuristic Japan filled with intelligent robots and holograms. Japan has a more mundane side that you won't find anywhere in these cyberpunk films. It involves fax machines, floppy disks and personalised ink stamps - relics that have long died out in other advanced nations, but have stubbornly persisted in Japan. For everyday residents, the lag in digital technology and the ensuing bureaucracy is at best inconvenient, and at worst, makes you want to tear your hair out. "Japanese banks are portals to hell," one Facebook user wrote in a local expat group. A commenter joked sarcastically: "Maybe sending a fax would help." The scale of the problem became terrifyingly clear during the Covid-19 pandemic, as the Japanese government struggled to respond to a nationwide crisis with clumsy digital tools. In the years since, they've launched a dedicated effort to close that gap, including a newly created Digital Agency and a host of new initiatives, but they're arriving to the tech race decades late - 36 years after the arrival of the World Wide Web and more than half a century after the first ever email was sent. Now, as the country races to transform itself, the question remains: What took them so long and can they still catch up? It wasn't always this way. Japan was the object of global admiration in the 1970s and '80s, when companies like Sony, Toyota, Panasonic and Nintendo became household names. Japan brought the world beloved devices like the Walkman, and games like Donkey Kong and Mario Bros, but that changed by the turn of the century, with the rise of computers and the internet. While the world shifted to software-driven economies, "Japan, with its strengths in hardware, was slow to adapt to software and services", said Daisuke Kawai, director of the University of Tokyo's Economic Security and Policy Innovation Program. A range of factors exacerbated the problem, he said. Japan didn't invest enough in information and communications technology, and as its electronics industry shrank, Japanese engineers flocked to foreign companies. That left a government with low digital literacy and a lack of skilled tech workers. Over time, different ministries and agencies adopted their own patchwork IT strategies, but there was never a unified government push - meaning public services never properly modernised, and remained reliant on paper documents and hand-carved, personalised seals called hanko that were used for identity verification. There were cultural factors too. "Japanese companies are known for their risk-averse culture, seniority-based, hierarchical system and a slow, consensus-driven decision-making process - all of which hampered innovation," Kawai said. Thanks to Japan's plummeting birthrate, it had far more old people than young people. This outsized elderly proportion meant a wider distrust of new technologies, wariness of digital fraud, a preference for traditional methods like the hanko, and "relatively little demand or pressure for digital services", Kawai said. That apathy was widespread, said Jonathan Coopersmith, professor emeritus of history at Texas A&M University. Small businesses and individuals didn't feel compelled to switch from fax machines to computers. Why buy expensive new machinery and learn how to use it, when fax worked fine and everybody in Japan used it anyway? Larger corporations and institutions, like banks or hospitals, found a potential switch too disruptive to daily services. "The bigger you are, the harder it is to change, especially software," said Coopersmith, who wrote about Japan's relationship with the fax machine in a 2015 book about the device. It also posed a legal headache. Any new technology required new laws - for instance, how electric scooters prompted new road regulations, or how countries worldwide were now trying to legislate against deepfakes and AI copyright after the AI boom. Digitising Japan would have required changing thousands of regulations, Coopersmith estimates, and lawmakers simply had no incentive to do so. After all, it's not like digitisation is a key issue driving votes in elections. The result was that, for decades, Japan remained stuck with old tech, even as it progressed in other ways - creating the ultimate contradiction. Japan had world-class robotics and aerospace industries, and features of day-to-day life that tended to awe foreign tourists, like safe and clean public spaces, ubiquitous vending machines and convenience stores, widely accessible public transit and a comprehensive bullet train system. Its digital failings looked even more stark by comparison. In 2018, Japan's then-cybersecurity minister sparked outrage and disbelief, when he claimed he'd never used a computer, since his secretaries did "that kind of thing", before walking back his remarks a few days later. In 2019, the last company in Japan still operating pagers finally halted services - decades after the personal messaging device was rendered obsolete by cellphones. The prevalence of old technology also created endless bureaucracy. Opening a bank account or registering for housing might require a hanko seal, along with documents of personal information you had to visit a local council to request in person, said Kawai. In the end, it took a global pandemic to finally force change. Japan's technological gap became evident, as national and local authorities became overwhelmed, without the digital tools to streamline their processes. In May 2020, months after the virus began running rampant globally, Japan's health ministry launched an online portal for hospitals to report cases, instead of relying on handwritten faxes, phone calls or emails. Even then, hiccups persisted. A contact tracing app had a months-long system error that failed to notify people of possible exposure, reported public broadcaster NHK. Adjusting to remote work and school was tough, as many had never used file-sharing services or video tools like Zoom. In one mind-boggling case in 2022, a Japanese town accidentally wired all its Covid relief fund - about 46.3 million yen (NZ$530,000) - to just one man's bank account. The confusion stemmed from the bank being given both a floppy disk of information and a paper request form, but by the time authorities realised their error, the man had already gambled away most of the funds, according to NHK. For anyone under 35, a floppy disk is a magnetic memory strip encased in plastic that is physically inserted into a computer. Each one typically stores up to 1.44MB of data - less than an average-resolution photo on your iPhone. The situation got so bad that, at one point, Takuya Hirai - who, in 2021, was appointed to the newly created role of Minister of Digital Transformation - described the country's handling of the pandemic as a "digital defeat". Thus, the Digital Agency was born - a department tasked with bringing Japan up to speed, born from a "combination of fear and opportunity", Coopersmith said. Created in 2021, it launched a series of initiatives, including rolling out a smart version of Japan's social security card and pushing for more cloud-based infrastructure. Last July, the Digital Agency finally declared victory in its "war on floppy disks", eliminating the disks across all government systems - a mammoth effort that required scrapping more than 1000 regulations governing their use. There were growing pains too. At one point, the government asked the public for their thoughts about the metaverse - through a convoluted system that required downloading an Excel spreadsheet, filling out your details and emailing the document back to the ministry, local media reported. After the move garnered scorn and disbelief on social media, then-Digital Minister Taro Kono wrote on Twitter: "The [ministry] will respond properly using an [online] form from now on." With the government firmly forging forward, companies hastened to follow, many hiring external contractors and consultants to help overhaul their systems, Kawai said. Masahiro Goto is one such consultant. As part of the Nomura Research Institute's (NRI) digital transformation team, he has helped large Japanese companies across all industries adapt to the digital world, from designing new business models to adopting new internal systems. These clients are often "eager to move forward, but they're unsure how to go about it", he told CNN. "Many are still using old systems that require a lot of maintenance or systems that are approaching end-of-service life. In many cases, that's when they reach out to us for help." The NRI consultants are in high demand. The number of companies reaching out for their services "has definitely been rising year by year", especially in the last five years, Goto said. For good reason. For years, Japanese companies outsourced their IT needs, meaning they now lacked the in-house skills to fully digitise. "Fundamentally, they want to make their operations more efficient and I believe they want to actively adopt digital technologies as a means of survival," he said. "After all, Japan's population is going to continue to decline, so improving productivity is essential." There may be resistance in certain pockets - the Digital Agency's plan to eliminate fax machines within the government received 400 formal objections from different ministries in 2021, according to local media. Things like the hanko seal - which are rooted in tradition and custom, and which some parents gift to their children when they come of age - may be harder to phase out, given their cultural significance. The pace of progress also depended on how willing the Digital Agency was to push regulatory reform and how much lawmakers would prioritise digitisation in creating future budgets, Kawai said. Japan was also playing catch-up with moving goalposts, as new technologies surged forward in other parts of the world. "This is going to be an ongoing challenge, because the digital technologies of 2025 are going to be different from the ones of 2030, 2035," Coopersmith said. Experts are optimistic. Kawai estimates, at this rate, Japan could catch up with some Western peers in 5-10 years. Finally, there's a public hunger for it, with more and more businesses accepting cashless payments and rolling out new online services. "People are generally eager to digitise for sure," Kawai said. "I'm sure that young people or the general public prefer to digitise as fast as possible." - CNN
RNZ News
18 hours ago
- RNZ News
The White House considering inviting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to Alaska
United States' President Donald Trump and Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky meet in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC on 28 February 2025. Photo: AFP / SAUL LOEB The White House is considering inviting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to Alaska, where United States' President Donald Trump is scheduled to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin on 15 August, NBC News has reported. The report cited a senior US official and three people briefed on the internal discussions. "It's being discussed," one of the people briefed on the talks was quoted as saying. The report added that no Zelensky visit was finalised and that it was unclear if the Ukrainian leader would ultimately be in Alaska for meetings but it remained a possibility. - Reuters
