Over the past few years, something has been slowly growing in Malaysia that doesn’t fit into the usual story about how anime has spread around the world. That story is mostly about how many people are streaming in the US, how conventions work in Europe, or how fan groups in South America work. What’s happening in Malaysia is more structural. It has to do with the infrastructure for production, education, and the fact that Japanese institutions are actually located in Malaysia. If you look at the pieces together, you can now see them clearly.
OLM Asia Studio in Cyberjaya is the most important single location. The Tokyo-based animation company OLM Inc. makes the Pokémon animated series, which is one of the most successful animation franchises ever. It wasn’t a cultural act or a soft-power exercise to open an operational outpost in Malaysia. It was a production decision based on the same reasoning that drives any creative industry to places with growing tech talent pools: trained artists, lower costs of doing business than Tokyo, and a government that has been pushing Cyberjaya as a creative and digital industries district for 20 years. At OLM Asia, artists from the area work directly on production pipelines for Japanese companies. Not just training for the sake of training, but real work on real projects. That’s a specific and meaningful kind of integration.
The Nippon Designers School Malaysia College is on Sunway GEO Avenue in Bandar Sunway, Selangor, and works directly with the Nippon Designers School in Tokyo. The school offers diploma and certificate programs in Digital Anime Art, Manga Illustration, and 3D Animation. The lessons and methods were created in Japan and then adapted for use in Malaysia. If a student in Kuala Lumpur wants to learn how to draw comics from a school with real Japanese roots instead of a local take on Japanese style, NDS offers something that wasn’t available in Malaysia ten years ago.
The University of Tsukuba Malaysia, which is on the campus of Universiti Malaya in Kuala Lumpur, is a completely different kind of commitment. It is Japan’s first branch campus outside of Japan. This is a big step toward internationalizing Japanese higher education, which the government has been slowly working toward for years. UTMy’s main focus is on collaborative science and design. Its anime and animation programs are not its main program. But having a Japanese university branch in Malaysia that works creates institutional infrastructure that doesn’t exist without the physical campus. For example, students can share experiences with faculty and work together on research projects.
There are no educational or production parts to INCUBASE Arena in Kuala Lumpur. It is on the side of the consumers. It’s a place where you can go to enjoy Japanese anime. It has immersive exhibitions, pop-up retail events, and themed experiences related to certain franchises, like Digimon exhibitions and Shin-chan events. Fans who want more than just a streaming service can go to INCUBASE, which has real-life places where the culture can be experienced. There are a lot of places in Tokyo like that. The fact that it’s now big enough to be seen in Kuala Lumpur shows how seriously the Japanese entertainment industry takes the Malaysian market.
When you look at these four places—a production company, a design college, a university branch campus, and a fan culture venue—as a whole, they make more sense than their individual announcements do. Malaysia has become a place where Japan’s animation industry has chosen to stay and not just hold fan events or license products. How that grows into something even bigger will depend on how well the talent pipeline develops and how well the governments on both sides continue to support the relationship. The early signs are good news.
