ABSTRACT

Robert Fuller, the handsome star of the TV western series Laramie, could not grasp the gigantic size of the crowd that had come to greet his arrival in Japan on April 17, 1961. Fuller, who had no inkling of his tremendous popularity in Japan, had earlier received an invitation from Akira Shimizu, the Japanese entrepreneur who owned the Japanese copyright to Laramie. An on-board fire after takeoff delayed his arrival until well in the middle of the night, but still, the size of the crowd floored Fuller. Hundreds of mostly female junior high and high school Laramie fans thronged the airport, jostling to catch a glimpse of this TV star. Fuller recalls, “I thought, my God, the Emperor must be on this plane! What was going on? My heart started to beat so hard. I never saw anything like this before!”1 Only then he realized that while popular in America, he was a mega-star in Japan and that the crowd had come for him.