Two Japanese men paid a brief visit to Hong Kong last week to help local volunteers clean up beaches in Sai Kung and Lamma Island. Manmosu Koichi, 34, and Tamotsu Taniguchi, 40, who are members of Make the Heaven, a conservation group in Japan, stayed in Hong Kong for four days for the beach cleanup, Apple Daily reported.
This was Koichi’s second time and Taniguchi’s third time traveling to Hong Kong for cleanup campaigns.
Patrick Yeung, project manager of WWF Hong Kong, and a group of volunteers accompanied Koichi and Taniguchi to Lo So Shing Beach at Sok Kwu Wan on Lamma Island on Friday to gather at least 15 bags of garbage, which weighed around 120 kilograms.
The Japanese duo also did underwater cleanups and collected 10 abandoned fishing nets that weighed a total of about 500kg.
On Saturday, Koichi and Taniguchi joined 30 volunteers and divers from The First Penguins, a local ocean-cleanup group, and collected 45 bags of waste weighing a total of 500kg and two ghost nets weighing 200kg in the areas around High Island Reservoir East Dam and Pak Lap Wan in Sai Kung.
Taniguchi said some Hongkongers might have thought they were insane but all he wanted to do was to spread the message of protecting the precious ocean.
Koichi told Apple Daily that he would come to Hong Kong again next year, and he hoped local people would show more concern over the problems of marine litter, as he believed that it was everyone’s responsibility to make the place they lived better.