Robert Haru Fisher is the pen name of Robert Charles Fisher (legal name).

Currently Columnist & Contributing Editor to the Frommers Online web site (www.frommers.com), he has been a travel writer and editor most of his adult life, editing nearly 800 books for the Fodor, Crown, Gault Millau and Fisher series, and writing several of them. Among his past credits, he has been President and Editor-in-Chief of the Fodor Travel Guidebook series, General Editor of the Crown Guide series, Editor of several Gault Millau titles and Editor-in-Chief of the 24 titles in the Fisher Guide series.

(The Frommers Online website gets about 20 million page views per month, representing 3 million actual visits and about one million unique visitors. In addition, Fisher's articles are pushed to about 250,000 subscribers to the thrice-weekly Frommers Online Newsletter.)

As a freelancer, he has written for Life, Sports Illustrated, Travel & Leisure, Budget Travel, Ford Times, the Washington Post and the San Francisco Chronicle, among other publications. He has been awarded a Gold Medal from the Pacific Asia Travel Association (PATA) for Best Newspaper Article.

Professionally, Fisher is a past president of the Society of American Travel Writers (SATW), past president of the New York Travel Writers Association (NYTWA) and a past officer of the British Guild of Travel Writers (GTW), and is now a trustee of the SATW Foundation, which gives awards for excellence in travel writing annually.

While working for Fodor's, Fisher lived 8 years in London, where he was responsible for publishing all titles relating to Asia, Africa and Europe. He lived 8 years in Tokyo, where he was responsible for the Fodor titles on East Asia, Southeast Asia and the Indian sub-continent. He now divides his time between New York City and Seattle.

Before his career as a writer and editor, Fisher was Far Eastern Representative of the United States National Student Association (USNSA), based in Tokyo, and a consultant to both the Central Policy Research Institute (Chuo Seisaku Kenkyu Sho) and to later Japanese Prime Minister Takeo Miki, also in Tokyo. He is the founder of the Key West Travel Writing Workshop (at which he teaches annually), and of the Kansas City Open Forum, both educational non-profit groups

Born and raised in Iowa and Missouri, Fisher is a graduate (cum laude) of Harvard College, and took postgraduate work at Columbia University Law School in New York and as a special research student of the Faculty of Law in Tokyo University, which he attended on a grant from the Baltimore Scholarship Fund. Concurrently with his studies in Japan, he represented the Ford Foundation and others in organizing scholarships throughout Asia for the Foreign Student Leadership Project of the USNSA, whose most prominent graduate is Kofi Annan, recently Secretary General of the United Nations. He also attended the University of Poona (now Pune) summer school and led a multi-party youth delegation to major university centers in India, Pakistan and Nepal thereafter.

Fisher is currently pro bono Vice President of the International Association for Medical Assistance to Travellers (IAMAT), a charity recognized by the Canadian and US governments, and Chairman of the Hotel & Restaurant Unsafe Food Labeling Action Committee (HARUFLAC), a non-profit consumer action group.

In addition to his travel books and articles, Fisher is the author of Picasso and Klee in the Tudor Art Masters Series. He is listed in both Who's Who in America and Who's Who in the World. He is a member of the Harvard Club of New York City, the American Club of Tokyo and the International House of Japan. He served in the US Army (CIC) for two years in Japan and Korea.

Bob took Haru as his pen name after the death of his partner of 33 years, Harukuni Nishizawa, a brilliant haute couture fashion designer, whose work appeared mostly in London and Tokyo.