Expedition Members

Mitsuro Ohba (Expedition Member, Japan)

Born January 10, 1953.
President of Earth Academy Mitsuro Ohba Adventure School

After engaging in farming at his home village of Yamagata Prefecture until the age of 29, Mitsuro Ohba became interested in farming practices in other parts of the world and travelled to China, Europe and South America. In 1983, he rafted down 6,000km on the Amazon to study the agriculture of the neighboring regions. Since then, he succeeded in solo walk across Greenland in 1985, solo walk across the Arctic Ocean in 1997, and solo walk across Antarctica in 1999. He became the first person to succeed in solo walk across both poles in the world. He won the Fourth Naomi Uemura Adventure Award.

[A comment from Ohba]
In 1986, I walked 900km round trip from Resolute (where we will set up the base camp for our upcoming expedition) and North Geomagnetic Pole. The following year, I did a solo walk from Resolute to Smith Strait via Gris Fjord which is the northernmost village of Canada.

Beginning of spring in Nunavut Territory of Canada is a severe environment where strong cold wind blows and temperature drops to 50 degrees below centigrade. Even in such environment, there are wild animals such as white wolf, polar bear, seal, arctic fox, rabbit, musk ox, caribou and lemming as well as many birds such as prairie chicken, hawk, polar tern and owl. Inuit people also receive blessings of nature and live in harmony with it by hunting these animals for for food and processing their fur for clothes.

What are Inuit people thinking, dreaming and living in the severe environment of Mother Nature? And what effect are waves of global warming having on the nature and wildlife of the far north? And how are the Inuit people thinking about and responding to global warming? I would like to look into these matters from a broad perspective. In addition, I am planning to have children visit the field so that they see it with their own eyes and communicate what they saw and felt in their bones from the perspective of children.

Let us depart on the journey to the far north with us!

Tetsuji Nagatani (Expedition Member, Japan)

Born March 9, 1977. Enrolled in School of Environmental Studies of Nagoya University. Engaged in study of topics that are attracting attention such as yellow sand particles and ozone layer at Spitsbergen Island of the Arctic region.

In 2004, he participated in the first leg of Global EdVenture in Greenland and entered the inland ice sheet with Mitsuro Ohba and succeeded in longitudinally traversing a distance of 2500km over a period of about two months. At the same time, he collected important data from atmosphere and snowfall samples in Greenland.

Noriko Miyashita (Expedition Member, Japan)

Born February 26, 1976. Graduated with a degree in International Relations from the Liberal Arts School of Tsudajuku University.

In 2004, she participated in the first leg of Global EdVenture in Greenland and supported Ohba and Miyashita who were traveling on the ice sheet as the base camp manager while actively visiting various areas of Greenland to report on the traditional culture of Inuit people as well as the environmental and social issues of Greenland from various aspects.

Izuru Toki (Expedition Member, Japan)

Born July 9, 1962. Graduated from Sophia University majoring in French Literature and International Relations. Photographer
After having worked for 10 years in the corporate world in the biggest cities such as New York and Tokyo, he journeyed to the Arctic, searching for the imaginary landscape strangely bedded in his mind since his early childhood.

At his first camp site on Alaska's Arctic Coast, he encountered with tens ofthousands of caribou. "In the land which, being in the middle of today's world, still retained its ancient stillness, I sensed something precious that the man could not afford to lose. I wanted to capture this 'something' with my camera..." , and since then, he has been photographing the Arctic and the life that lives there, and his work has been published in various magazines in Japan and internationally.