A Japanese alpinist-adventurer who became the youngest in the world to stand atop the highest peaks in the seven continents by scaling Mount Everest at the age of 25 in May 1999 returned to the world's tallest mountain a year later to clean up garbage left by his peers over the years.

Ken Noguchi and his 29-member party, including 22 local sherpas, collected some 1.5 tons of used tents, leftover food, oxygen cylinders, and even syringes with needles attached that littered the climbing path from base camp in Tibet up to the last camp site 8,300 meters above sea level.

Noguchi, a graduate student at Aomori University, said he decided to carry out the cleanup operation on Mount Everest, called Chomolungma in Tibetan, after mountaineers from other countries accused Japanese climbing parties of leaving mountains of garbage behind.

"I was really shocked to hear people say Japanese climbers are third-rate in their manners. The garbage collected was largely that left by Japanese parties in the 1980s and there was little from the 1990s. So I think Japanese climbers' manners are improving," he explained at a news conference in Tokyo on June 5.

"It took an hour to bring out a used tent from under the snow, and it's practically impossible to collect all the garbage left behind. Climbers should take their things home themselves," Noguchi said. Of the garbage collected by his party, some 500 kilograms thought to be from Japanese climbers were shipped back to be put on display in Japan.

The idea of conquering the seven peaks came to Noguchi when he read a book written by Japanese adventurer Naomi Uemura. (Uemura failed to return to base camp after a solo winter ascent of Mount McKinley in Alaska in February 1984. His body was never found.)

Noguchi reached the summit of Mont Blanc in the Alps in August 1989, when he was only 16, and climbed Kilimanjaro in Africa in December of the same year. The 8,848-meter Mount Everest was the last peak he had to scale in realizing his dream after two failed attempts.

Pointing out that the garbage he found in Mount Everest was almost entirely from Asian mountaineers, Noguchi said he plans to organize an international cleanup party with Asian climbers next year.

Photo: Noguchi works to clean up a tent left above 8,000 meters on the mountain. (JIJI)