February 26th 2008 Kyu Sakamoto on Steve Allen show
Kyu Sakamoto traveled to the USA on August 13, 1963 after his growing popularity he gained by his hit song “Ue wo muite arukou” (I Look Up When I Walk). Allen asked Sakamoto to tell a joke, which he did in Japanese and which was greeted with much laughter by the audience. This, despite the fact that he told the joke to an English speaking American audience.
Sakamoto (November 10, 1941 - August 12, 1985) was so appealing that his song upset Leslie Gore’s “It’s My Party” to become the number one popular song in the U.S. on 15 June 1963, shortly before this appearance on the Tonight Show. Sakanoto was killed on board JAL Flight 123, a 747 bound from Haneda Airport in Tokyo to Osaka. That plane lost pieces of its tail sections and spiraled downward nightmarishly for 30 minutes, long enough for some passengers to scribble shaky farewells to their families. The plane crashed and burned on a thickly wooded mountain about 60 miles northwest of Tokyo, killing 520 and injuring four, in the worst single airplane disaster in aviation history to that date.
