RCTI, Indonesia's first privately owned television network, began the anime boom of the 1990s with Doraemon. It has held the same broadcast slot—8:00 a.m. on Sundays—since it began airing in 1991.
Doraemon is a cultural phenomenon in Indonesia. From Saya Shiraishi's "Japan's Soft Power: Doraemon Goes Abroad" in Network and Power: Japan and Asia (Cornell University Press, 1997):
When I visited Indonesia in the early 1990s, Doraemon had been on the air for two years and the blue robot cat was already a highly popular and intimately familiar figure. One Sunday morning at 8:00 a.m., I witnessed a friend's 5-year-old son turn on the TV set precisely when Doraemon, dubbed into Bahasa Indonesia, started. He watched it, engrossed, for half an hour (two episodes), and as soon as it was over, he switched the set off and began to play video games. Only Doraemon could compete with the video games! My friend, who formerly enjoyed sleeping in on Sundays, now gets up to watch Doraemon with his son. He has also bought him Doraemon character toys for his birthday. An Indonesian cabinet minister confesses that he watches Doraemon every Sunday, and when he cannot, he asks his wife to videotape the day's episodes for him. In 1994, the first survey on children's television programs in Indonesia was conducted, and Doraemon ranked first in all four areas surveyed—Jakarta, Medan, Surabaya, and Semarang.
Why did RCTI broadcast Doraemon? One factor was cost. Shiraishi points out that, in 1993, domestically-produced programming cost the network Rp. 40 million ($20,000) per hour. On the other hand, imported programming only cost Rp. 5–10 million ($2,500–5,000) per hour.
RCTI's broadcast of Doraemon was soon followed with other shows by SCTV and Indosiar, also new private networks. These networks had begun operating following a deregulation of the television sector in the late 1980s, breaking the monopoly of the state-owned TVRI.
It should be highlighted that TVRI is credited for the first anime program broadcast in Indonesia, Wanpaku Oomukashi Kum Kum, in the 1970s. During the interim years before Doraemon began broadcasting, anime could be found on VHS in video stores.