The Pokémon Company has become the first major Japanese rights holder to publicly condemn the political use of its imagery, while a fan petition has gathered nearly 20,000 signatures.
For the past three months, a low-grade argument has been building in Japan over a question most American news consumers never asked: who gets to use Pikachu, Naruto, and Goku in American political messaging? The argument escalated this week, when the Pokémon Company issued a formal condemnation of the White House's use of its imagery.
According to BBC News Tokyo correspondent Kurumi Mori, the company said the White House had no permission to use its Pokémon imagery and was not involved in its creation or distribution. A company spokeswoman, Sravanthi Dev, also said Pokémon's mission carries no affiliation with any political viewpoint or agenda.
The post in question layered a "Make America Great Again" graphic over a screenshot from the Pokémon video game Pokopia. It was one of at least three separate uses of Japanese anime and manga characters by Trump or the White House since March 2026, according to the BBC's review.
The full set spans the personal and the official. Trump's personal account posted a video on Saturday depicting himself as Naruto Uzumaki. The official White House X account, separately, ran a video combining footage of US military strikes on Iran with clips from Yu-Gi-Oh! and Dragon Ball. The Pokopia image went out from the same official account. The BBC notes it has contacted the White House and other rights-holders, including Shueisha, the publisher of Naruto and Yu-Gi-Oh!, and Toei Animation, which controls Dragon Ball, but had not received responses at the time of publication.
That response gap is itself part of the story. Most Japanese rights-holders have stayed silent while their characters have circulated in US political feeds. The Pokémon Company is the first major Japanese rights-holder to issue a public statement on the record refusing the political use of its imagery — a notable break from the silence of Shueisha and Toei, which have not responded to BBC's requests for comment. The claim is accurate on its face: no other major rights-holder has issued a comparable statement. It remains conditional on the possibility that a silent rights-holder may hold a private position that differs from its public silence.
The statement came as a fan-led petition titled "Trump and the White House: Respect Japanese Manga" approached 20,000 signatures.
The petition, hosted on Change.org and first launched in March, was revived this week after the Truth Social Naruto video. Its text argues that Trump "does not share the values" of the characters he is borrowing, and lists "courage, friendship, and perseverance" as qualities the signatories fear are being co-opted. The platform's signature counts are self-reported and should be read as a sentiment signal, not a poll. Twenty thousand is a small fraction of the global Naruto or Pokémon audience, but it is large enough to suggest this is not a fringe view, and it is the first time a popular petition on the subject has been quantified in English-language reporting.
Japanese fans are not unified. The BBC also documented counter-voices on X, where some users said they found the use "hilarious" and framed it as global recognition of Japanese manga. One user wrote that they were "proud" Naruto had reached the US president. The split matters: it tells readers the dispute is genuinely internal to Japanese fandom, not an external imposition.
What the Pokémon Company's statement changes is the audience for the dispute. Until this week, the argument was largely between US-based political observers and a diffuse group of Japanese fans. The company's statement moves it into the territory of formal intellectual-property stewardship. The company is not (in the available reporting) claiming infringement. It is doing something narrower and arguably more significant: it is asserting that the use was unauthorized, and that the brand will not be associated with any political viewpoint. For a franchise whose corporate owners have publicly positioned it as politically neutral, the statement functions as a boundary line.
The next moves worth watching are the other rights-holders. If Shueisha or Toei follow Pokémon's lead, the argument moves from a single corporate statement into a coordinated industry position. If they stay silent, the Pokémon Company will be carrying the institutional weight alone, and the petition's 20,000 signatures will remain the loudest non-corporate signal. Either way, the norm being negotiated in real time is whether a sitting US administration can treat Japanese pop-cultural icons as fair game for political imagery without consulting the people who own them.