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.

Whittaker says the title reflects his life's philosophy: "I took it from a saying that if you're not living on the edge you're taking up too much space," he said.

"Like Churchill once said, 'If you play for more than you can afford to lose, you learn the game.' When you're on the edge you are more aware of life, you learn."

Although Whittaker insists he is "not talking about thrill-seeking, but about learning through experience," there is little doubt that his "edge" has been somewhat narrower and its limits infinitely more tested than most other mortal beings.

At age 14, he took his twin brother, Louie, and elder brother, Barney, on their first real climb, up a 1,700-meter peak in Washington's Cascade Mountains. There they experienced for the first time what climbers commonly call "exposure" -- "that heart-in-your-mouth surge of sheer terror when you first look down from a great height," he said.

The three boys made a vow that if they got down off the mountain alive they would never climb again. Whittaker says that while Barney ("the older and so the wiser brother") kept his word, the twins "spent the rest of our lives breaking it."

When it came to the Everest climb, even Louie was to follow Barney's lead. Both twins had been invited to join the expedition, which took place in 1963, just a decade after Sir Edmund Hillary's landmark bid, and became only the third successful summit of the world's highest peak. Louie, who was about to embark on a new business venture, pulled out -- a decision that Whittaker says troubled him for years to come.

Jim's successful climb was met with much fanfare in the U.S., where he soon became a national hero. Some 37 years later, he recalls vividly the final assault on the summit with Sherpa Nawang Gombu.

In particular, he remembers how Gombu, when asked at a news conference in Delhi what had passed through his mind after reaching the highest point on Earth, had dryly answered, "How to get down."

"Twenty minutes on top of Everest, without bottled oxygen, it's minus 30 C and blowing at 50 mph. It was all we could think about," Whittaker said.

At the start of the descent, however, his priorities took an almost Monty Pythonesque turn.

"I suddenly had this urgent need to take a crap," Whittaker, 72, confessed. "Imagine: There's a hurricane-force wind and I'm oxygen-starved. But I dropped my pants to deliver what must be the highest call of nature by mankind."

Whittaker readily admits that the climb opened many doors, none more so than a climb with Kennedy in 1965 that resulted in close friendship with the former senator right up to the time of his assassination.

Whittaker recalls that he first met Kennedy after being invited to lead a surveying expedition up Mount Kennedy, Canada's highest unclimbed mountain, which had been named after Robert's brother, former U.S. President John F. Kennedy, a year after his murder.

He was also told he'd be taking along Robert, who had no previous climbing experience.

"I immediately contacted the senator and told him it would be a tough climb. What was he doing to get in shape?" Whittaker recalled. "He replied, 'I'm running up and down the stairs, practicing hollerin' 'Help!' "

Kennedy became the first person to summit the mountain, and Whittaker became a frequent feature at Kennedy family ski trips and dinners. More famously, it also led to Whittaker's appointment as manager of the senator's election campaign in Washington state in 1968.

Whittaker sadly recalls his devastation when Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in California and how he flew back to Washington on Air Force One with his body. He was also a pallbearer at his funeral.

"We really hit it off. When you climb with someone, you get stuck up in many different places and situations. You either get as mad as hell or get along. I can't tell you how hard it was to write that chapter (of the autobiography)."

Having successfully climbed many of the world's highest mountains and guided disabled people, including injured Vietnam war veterans, up his beloved Mount Rainier, Whittaker went back to Everest in 1990 as leader of the historic Peace Climb, which brought together climbers from the U.S., China and then Soviet Union.

The climb -- "the summit of summits," said Whittaker -- coincided with Earth Day, and in addition to successfully getting members from each team to the summit the expedition also pulled 2 tons of garbage off the notoriously littered mountain -- a feat that made the Guinness Book of World Records.

"It had been 27 years (since the first climb), and so much had changed," Whittaker said. "For example, in 1963, someone had to run 185 miles (to Everest) to deliver the mail. In 1990, I was being congratulated by President Bush over a (satellite-linked) telephone."

Whittaker is also planning one more visit to Japan, for his first ever attempt up Mount Fuji. First, however, he must complete another daredevil mission, this one with his second wife, Dianne, and their two teenage children: a circumnavigation of the globe in his yacht Impossible.

"I've learned over the years that risk is an inherent part of a life well lived," Whittaker said.

"In any walk of life, not just mountain climbing, if you stick your neck out your odds of winning are at least 50-50. If you don't, the odds you'll lose are high. It's pretty obvious stuff, but sometimes we forget that."