The candidate for the 20-million-dollar trip is Japanese investor Daisuke Enomoto, a 34-year-old former board director of the Livedoor Internet firm headed by flamboyant entrepreneur Takafumi Horie, local media said.

Enomoto has already passed medical checks and started flight training for a trip in late 2006, Jiji Press news agency reported.

Enomoto said in January that he was likely to be the first Japanese to make a paid space trip.

"I'm planning to do something amusing," he wrote then on his website.

If he gets Russian approval, Enomoto said he wanted to dress up on the trip as "Char Aznable", a character in the popular "Gundam" hero robot series of animation whose name is inspired by French singer Charles Aznavour.

Enomoto describes himself as a "Gundam otaku (geek)".

The third civilian to pay for a space flight, US millionaire businessman Greg Olsen, returned to Earth on Tuesday in the Soyuz space capsule.

The 60-year-old American paid Space Adventures 20 million dollars for a seat aboard the capsule and eight days of gazing down at the Earth from the International Space Station, 230 miles (370 kilometers) up.

He was preceded into space by two other millionaire tourists, American Dennis Tito in 2001 and South African Mark Shuttleworth the following year.

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