Indonesians born in the 1980s and beyond grew up with anime on national television. For a time, anime became a cultural phenomenon and permeated through all levels of society. (See my answer to Who must I thank for the Japanese anime in Indonesian TVs in the 90s?)

However, anime did not become popular on its own. Comics have existed in Indonesia since the pre-independence period, popularized by the many of the same newspapers that formed the backbone of the nationalist movement. When the local comics market declined in the 1970s, it was replaced with translated import comics, primarily from Japan. The rise of translated manga was a precursor to the anime boom.

“Between 1985 and 1994, the most prolific comics publisher, Elex Media Komputindo, published 1,500 titles, 606 of which were children’s comics, and 90 percent were licensed Japanese comics. In 1995, translated Japanese comics were selling as many as 85,000 copies per volume, four times more than the most popular Indonesian novels at the time. By 2003, some translated manga were among the top five in the book sales chart in Indonesia.

These translated Japanese comics enjoyed a print run in Indonesia five times higher (15,000 copies per title) than any other books (3,000 copies per title). The sales of a single translated manga can reach up to 32,000 copies, a number that general Indonesian fiction (including novels) cannot achieve. By this time manga had gained sufficient recognition for Indonesian national newspapers to add the word to their lexicon.”

—Kristine M. Santos and Febriani Sihombing, “Is there a space for cool manga in Indonesia and the Philippines?” in The End of Cool Japan: Ethical, legal, and cultural challenges to Japanese popular culture (2017), edited by Mark McLelland

Today, children’s anime remain accessible on national television. Cable networks such as Japan’s Animax and South Korea’s Aniplus are also accessible to a growing middle class population. Additionally, the Internet has helped spread anime to the burgeoning youth population.