TOKYO — Yuichiro Miura has an unusual routine for a man who just turned 75.
At dawn, the veteran adventurer wakes after a night in a private low-oxygen chamber. He straps weights onto his ankles, hoists a 44-pound backpack onto his shoulders and hikes for hours around Tokyo. Sometimes, he adds a stroll on his treadmill.
Ask Miura why he isn’t on the golf course or puttering around a vegetable garden, and he has a simple answer: Mount Everest.
Miura is one of Japan’s old men of the mountain, a small cluster of graying Japanese climbers who since 2002 have been passing among themselves an august title: the oldest person to have conquered the world’s tallest peak.
“It’s a tough but wonderful thing to get to the peak when you are past 70,” Miura said at his Tokyo home. “I hope to send the message that we have the potential for many things in this aging society.”
Miura is already famous for having skied part of the way down Everest in 1970, a feat captured in an Oscar-winning documentary. Now, for seniors like him, climbing the 29,035-foot Himalayan peak is as extreme an elderly activity as they come.
It’s no wonder that the Japanese have cornered the market in elderly Everest mountaineers. The country has the world’s longest-living population and is going through a boom in activities for the elderly.
Now, Miura wants to reach the summit again.
“It feels like the goddess of Everest is beckoning me to come back,” said Miura, who is planning an attempt on the mountain next spring, when he’ll be 75 (Edmund Hillary was 33 when he became the first man to climb Everest, in 1953).
Some attribute the prevalence of Japanese adventurers among the ranks of older climbers to the same factors that make them live increasingly longer: a diet heavy in vegetables and fish, excellent health care and trim physiques.
