Ken Noguchi, Japan

The

Japanese take their trash collection seriously. Pity the poor gaijin who mixes his combustibles with his noncombustibles. But that conscientiousness is often left at base camp when Japanese climb Mount Fuji. One of Japan's most revered natural wonders, the 3,776-m mountain may also be one of its dirtiest. The 200,000 or so visitors who climb Mount Fuji every high season leave behind panoramic piles of refuse on the peak, while overworked toilets along the climbing trail overflow with excrement.

Fortunately for Fujisan, as the Japanese call the mountain, it's on the route of the best alpine garbageman in the world. His name is Ken Noguchi, and he is an unlikely candidate for such unglamorous work. The son of a wealthy Japanese diplomat and an Egyptian mother, Noguchi grew up as something of a wild child; he says his family was too busy to pay attention to him. His anxious father sent him to boarding school in England when he was 12, but Noguchi was just as lost there. "I was a dropout," he says. "What I sought was my own world." When he discovered mountaineering, inspired by a book by the great Japanese adventurer Naomi Uemura, he knew he had found that world. The alpine prodigy began scaling every mountain he could find, and when he conquered Everest in 1999 after two failures, Noguchi became, at the time, the youngest person ever to climb the tallest peaks on all seven continents.

But on his way up Everest, Noguchi noticed that the growing ranks of fellow mountaineers left piles of discarded climbing gear and trash—much of the rubbish bearing Chinese, Korean or Japanese labels. When a European climber noted in passing that "Japan is a developed country, but without any manners," Noguchi decided something had to be done. Returning to Everest in 2000, he climbed the mountain four times over the next four years with an international team that cleared nearly eight tons of waste from its slopes, including more than 400 discarded oxygen containers. Local Nepalese villagers didn't see the point of the project at first, but eventually joined in enthusiastically, realizing that their success could provide a potent example in their polluted country. "They said, 'We want to change Nepal from Mount Everest,'" Noguchi recalls.

At the same time, Noguchi took on an even more challenging cleanup project: Mount Fuji. If Everest is one of the most difficult mountains in the world to climb, Fuji is definitely the hardest to clean up. "I was shocked by how terrible it was," he says. "This is a national park." So, in 2000, Noguchi teamed up with the Fujisan Club, a local environmental group, and started leading collection expeditions up the mountain. Along the way, he inspired thousands of ordinary citizens to begin picking up, too. Today, Fuji is far cleaner, and with the toilets at all 48 locations on the mountain set to be eco-friendly by March 2007, it could become almost pristine again. Noguchi hopes the effort will permanently change Japan's attitude toward its mountains, just as taking up climbing as a teen changed his own perspective. "We must have a different environmental consciousness," he says. "I want to make [Fuji] a model for other mountains. I want to change Japan from Mount Fuji."