Junko Tabei

Junko Tabei was born Junko Ishibashi on September 22, 1939, in Miharu, a small town in Fukushima Prefecture in northern Japan ^[1]. She was one of seven children in the family of a printer, and by her own account she was a frail child, small for her age and not obviously suited to strenuous sport ^[2].

Her first encounter with mountains came at the age of ten, when a teacher took her class on a trip to Mount Nasu, a volcanic peak in the Nikko region. The experience left a lasting mark. Climbing, she found, was not a race: it rewarded steady effort rather than raw speed or size, and a small girl could reach the same summit as anyone else ^[2]. Her family's modest means limited how often she could travel to the mountains during her school years, so the interest stayed largely dormant through her adolescence.

In 1958 she entered Showa Women's University in Tokyo, where she studied English and American literature and graduated in 1962 ^[1]. University life brought her back to climbing. After graduation she joined mountaineering clubs around Tokyo and spent weekends on the peaks of Honshu, gradually working through the major Japanese summits, including Mount Fuji and the steep granite of the Japanese Alps ^[3].

Climbing culture in postwar Japan was overwhelmingly male, and Tabei felt the barriers directly. Some men refused to climb with her; others assumed a young woman joined a club only to look for a husband ^[2]. Rather than keep negotiating for a place in men's expeditions, she created an alternative. In 1969 she founded the Joshi-Tozan Club, the Ladies Climbing Club of Japan, one of the first climbing associations in the country organized by and for women ^[1].

The club's early ambitions were serious from the start. In 1970 Tabei was part of a Japanese women's expedition to Annapurna III in Nepal, a 7,555 meter peak in the Himalaya. The team reached the summit, and the climb gave Tabei her first experience of high-altitude expedition logistics: permits, porters, oxygen planning, and the long grind of establishing camps ^[3].

By this time she had married Masanobu Tabei, a fellow climber she met on Tanigawa, a mountain notorious among Japanese alpinists for its accident record ^[2]. The marriage proved unusually supportive for its era. While Junko trained and traveled, Masanobu shared household duties and childcare, an arrangement that drew comment in 1970s Japan but made her expedition career possible ^[4].

The Ladies Climbing Club applied for a permit to climb Mount Everest in 1971 and waited four years for a slot, a normal delay in the era when Nepal allowed only one expedition per route per season ^[3]. The resulting Japanese Women's Everest Expedition brought together fifteen women, with Tabei as climbing leader, plus Sherpa support. Funding was a constant struggle. Sponsors doubted that women could manage the mountain, and team members sewed their own equipment and stretched budgets by making gear from recycled materials ^[2].

The expedition nearly ended in disaster. On May 4, 1975, an avalanche swept through Camp II at roughly 6,300 meters while the climbers slept, burying Tabei and several teammates under snow and debris. Sherpas dug her out; she lost consciousness during the burial and needed days to recover enough to walk ^[1]. The team pressed on, but the avalanche and the loss of supplies meant only one climber could make the final push.

On May 16, 1975, Tabei and the Sherpa guide Ang Tsering reached the summit of Everest by the South Col route, making her the first woman to stand on the highest point on Earth ^[1]. The achievement, twelve days after the avalanche, drew worldwide attention. Eleven days later the Tibetan climber Phantog summited from the north side, a reminder of how close the race had been ^[3]. Tabei consistently played down the record itself, saying she had simply climbed the mountain as the thirty-sixth person to do so.

Everest did not end Tabei's ambitions; it reorganized them. Over the following two decades she pursued the highest mountain on each continent. She climbed Kilimanjaro in Tanzania in 1980, Aconcagua in Argentina in 1987, Denali in Alaska in 1988, Elbrus in the Caucasus in 1989, and Vinson Massif in Antarctica in 1991 ^[3].

The list closed on June 28, 1992, when she reached the top of Puncak Jaya (Carstensz Pyramid) in Indonesia, completing the Seven Summits. She was the first woman to finish the set ^[1]. Among Junko Tabei achievements, the Seven Summits record is often cited alongside Everest, but it captures only part of her output: by her own tally she eventually climbed the highest peak in more than seventy countries ^[4].

She funded these later expeditions largely on her own terms. Wary of corporate sponsorship after the compromises of 1975, she paid her way through guided climbing tours, lectures, writing, and music recitals, preferring independence to obligation ^[2].

From the 1990s onward Tabei devoted much of her energy to the condition of the mountains themselves. She grew alarmed by the garbage, abandoned oxygen bottles, and human waste accumulating on Everest and other heavily climbed peaks. In 2000 she completed postgraduate study at Kyushu University, where her research examined waste and environmental degradation on Everest caused by climbing expeditions ^[1].

She served as director of the Himalayan Adventure Trust of Japan, an organization working to protect mountain environments, and helped organize clean-up climbs on Everest and on Mount Fuji at home ^[4]. She also led annual youth climbs of Fuji for students from Tohoku, the region of her birth, after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami devastated coastal Fukushima ^[5].

Her personal life stayed rooted in Japan. She and Masanobu raised two children, a daughter, Noriko, and a son, Shinya, and settled in Kawagoe, near Tokyo ^[1]. Tabei wrote several books in Japanese about her climbs; a memoir assembled from her writings appeared in English translation as Honouring High Places in 2017 ^[6].

Tabei kept climbing long past the age when most expedition mountaineers retire. In 2012 she was diagnosed with peritoneal cancer, a disease she discussed openly, and she refused to let treatment end her time in the mountains ^[5]. She continued to organize and join climbs between hospital stays, including the Fuji ascents with young people from the disaster-hit northeast.

Her final years brought growing recognition. In 2016, researchers who discovered a mountain range on Pluto named it Tabei Montes in her honor, one of the first planetary features named for a female explorer ^[3].

Junko Tabei died on October 20, 2016, at a hospital in Kawagoe, Saitama Prefecture, at the age of 77 ^[1]. Obituaries around the world recorded her not only as the first woman on Everest but as a climber who had reshaped what expedition mountaineering could look like ^[5].

Any Junko Tabei biography returns to a single theme: she widened the sport. When she began, Himalayan expeditions were organized on the assumption that women belonged at base camp, if anywhere. Her all-women teams on Annapurna III and Everest demonstrated, with summits rather than arguments, that the assumption was wrong ^[2]. Thousands of women have since climbed Everest, and climbers and historians routinely trace that lineage back to May 16, 1975 ^[3].

Her environmental work left a second inheritance. The clean-up expeditions, the Kyushu University research, and her public criticism of overcrowding on Everest anticipated debates that now dominate discussion of the mountain ^[4]. She argued that access to peaks came with responsibility for them, a position that gained force as commercial climbing expanded.

Among the most repeated Junko Tabei facts is her own description of herself: not a record chaser but simply the thirty-sixth person to climb Everest, someone who never intended to stop. Google marked what would have been her 80th birthday with a commemorative Doodle in September 2019, introducing her story to a generation born after her most famous climb ^[5].