Japanese ambassador Masafumi Ishii wins Indonesians’ hearts one kawaii Instagram post at a time

Combining kawaii – cute in Japanese – poses, a batik top, and a veritable smorgasbord of Indonesian cuisines and matching poses has proved a winning combination. Ishii is the sort of person who mimes poultry before tucking into a meal of Balinese fried duck; little wonder the ambassador has more than 67,000 followers on Instagram, an increase of some 30,000 from just two months ago.

“I signed up for Instagram in March 2018 and started to post in October 2018. I wanted to post pictures of my daily activities in the hopes that more people in Indonesia would become interested in Japan. I usually brainstorm with my staff about what I should post. It’s a trial and error process to see what people find most interesting,” he said in an email interview with This Week in Asia.

Does he have a favourite dish? “I get that question a lot, but it’s difficult for me to choose just one because I like all the Indonesian dishes that I’ve tried. Usually, I tell my staff what I feel like having [rice or noodles and so on], and then they will decide on the menu. My staff makes a list of Indonesian dishes that I haven’t tried yet so that they can pick one from the list,” he said.

Ishii’s posts are carefully curated by him and his staff – and the photo compositions show their attention to detail and humour.

In one post, the ambassador is shown with a Sundanese food spread featuring a variety of vegetable dishes including tofu and mushrooms wrapped in a banana leaf and sayur asem, or vegetables in tamarind soup. He has posed holding a wayang golek, or rod puppet, and in apparent reference to previous comments that his lunches look hearty, writes that he “can eat a lot because most of it is vegetables”.