French film star Alain Delon, who died on Sunday aged 88, said he was like a god in Japan. Local fans told AFP on Monday that this was no exaggeration.
“In Japan I’m a kind of god,” Delon told Figaro magazine in 1986, while on one of his many trips to Japan, when women fainted and crowds chased his limousine.
“People get real pleasure out of touching me, caressing my hands, kissing my fingers,” she told the magazine, adding that fans give her gifts ranging from red roses to statues.
Delon’s breakthrough role in Japan was “Purple Noon,” in which he played a handsome, homicidal antihero adapted for the original screen version of Patricia Highsmith’s thriller “The Talented Mr. Ripley.”
Film critic Sahoko Hata, who worked in the Japanese film industry at the time, said “Delon played an ambitious rogue who loved money and women and was up for anything.”
“This thirst symbolized the thirst of Japanese youth at that time,” Hata told AFP.
Delon made several trips to Japan in 1963 to promote his films, and also appeared on various television programs and social events.
His TV appearances often broke viewership records and by the mid-1970s he regularly topped rankings of Japan’s most popular celebrities.
“All my friends from the 70s and 80s still love him very much. Even at 88, he looked great,” Seta, 74, a Delon fan, told AFP on Monday.
“I often wondered: ‘How can such a charming person exist in this world?'” the pensioner said in Tokyo.
“He was handsome, elegant and a bit mysterious,” she said.
For Kaoru Fujita, a woman in her 50s shopping with her daughter in Tokyo, Delon’s name was “synonymous with handsome man.”
“If I had to compare him to anyone I would say George Clooney or Brad Pitt,” she told AFP.
“But I don’t think there is anyone as handsome as him. As an actor he was unrivalled.”
Delon gradually transformed himself into a kind of ambassador of French fashion, becoming the face of the Japanese fashion brand D’Urban and appearing in advertisements for Mazda cars.
The “Alain Delon” brand was launched in 1978, primarily aimed at Japan and other Asian countries, selling items ranging from watches and socks to cigarettes.
In the 1980s and 1990s, a Japanese tour operator also offered organised trips to Europe, including a banquet in Paris attended by Dylan.
Additional paid options included the honor of presenting Delon with a bouquet or having a souvenir photo taken with him.
Yoshi Yatabe, a former programmer at the Tokyo International Film Festival, told AFP in 2022 that Delon “had a dark, tragic, mysterious, ambitious side, but he was also a bit of a failure.”
“This dark side appealed to Japanese audiences, who love losers. For example, in kabuki theater, audiences sympathize with the weakest people,” he said.
“France and Europe were very far away places to me, so I always wondered where he came from,” recalled Mikiko Tsuburaya, 71, a pensioner.
“I was still a child, not grown up yet. I looked at him as someone living in another world,” the pensioner said.
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