Topic: Founders and National Leaders
How does Indonesia mark Founders and National Leaders?
Hari Kartini
- Local date
- April 21, 2027
21 April is Hari Kartini, for Raden Ajeng Kartini. According to the Cabinet Secretariat, President Sukarno signed Presidential Decision No. 108 of 1964 on 2 May 1964, doing two things at once: recognising Kartini as a National Hero of Independence and fixing her birthday, 21 April, as a national day of commemoration. A national day of commemoration is not a day off. The joint decision of three ministers — signed on 19 September 2025 by the ministers of religious affairs, manpower and administrative reform — lists seventeen national holidays for 2026, and 21 April is not one of them. Schools open as usual; what changes is that students wear kebaya and the day fills with recitations and contests.
Hari Lahir Pancasila
- Local date
- June 1, 2027
1 June, Hari Lahir Pancasila, is the Indonesian holiday that really does close everything — and it is named after a doctrine rather than the man who proposed it. President Joko Widodo signed Presidential Decision No. 24 of 2016 at Gedung Merdeka in Bandung on 1 June 2016; its first and second operative clauses set 1 June 1945 as the birth date of Pancasila and make 1 June a national holiday. What happened on that date was Sukarno's speech to the investigating committee for independence, where he set out five principles and gave them the name Pancasila. The holiday kept the name of the principles and not the name of the speaker. On the 2026 national holiday list it is entry number twelve.
What is this topic?
In federal law the third Monday in February is still called Washington's Birthday.
It is written that way in 5 U.S.C. §6103(a), the section that lists all eleven legal public holidays, and the Office of Personnel Management footnotes every annual holiday table to say that although states and businesses may use other names, its policy is to use the name in the statute.
"Presidents' Day" is a state and retail habit that federal law never adopted.
Taiwan went the other way and gave one man two dates: Article 3 of its Commemorative Days and Holidays Act lists both the birthday of the founding father (12 November) and the anniversary of his death (12 March), and Article 4 grants a day off for neither.
Japan stripped every personal name out of its holiday law in 1948; none of today's sixteen national holidays carries an individual's name, and 29 April commemorates the Shōwa era rather than the emperor who reigned through it.
Brazil's first republican decree in 1890 named Tiradentes outright, while the statute in force today says only "21 April".
Sources and dates
Dates follow local time zones, calendars, and official notices. Check the source when a date is estimated or locally variable.