It's not entirely clear which of his visits to Japan Jim Whittaker remembers the most. The latest, earlier this year, was to promote his autobiography and attend the opening of the first overseas branch of Recreation Equipment Inc., the outdoor goods cooperative he helped set up in Seattle in 1950.
The first visit, some 37 years earlier, was a stopoff on the way to Nepal, where Whittaker became the first American to summit Mount Everest.
Whittaker's biography, "A Life on the Edge," is a journey through his teenage ventures as both recreational and rescue mountaineer on Mount Rainier and many other peaks in his home state of Washington, to his historic climb of Sagarmatha and his role as Robert F. Kennedy's election campaign manager.